[shmatt]

With all respect (and I completely expected the downvotes to my original post) - "link in bio" is not what people consider selling on Instagram

You make selling on Instagram easy by charging $6/month. I don't think you should be ashamed of that, nor tell people they can use your website to sell via "link in bio"

I believe the winner in this unclaimed race will offer Instagram Shopping integration for free, by figuring out a way to minimize losses, while hoarding customers

[imsamyang]

Hi, Sam here (other co-founder) -- I think you're correct if you're talking about e-commerce on IG in general, but for the thrift/secondhand sellers that we serve, selling is a much more individualized/personalized process involving comment-bids, negotiations on DMs, live sales/story sales, etc.

So for the majority of these folks, Instagram Shopping is a nice-to-have but not a necessity because they're mostly dealing w/ one-offs and the convenience of a product tag is not that important when customers don't mind just going to their link in bio & browsing their 5-25 available products (they may even prefer this, because they may want to buy multiple items).

That's the main reason we made it a premium feature: the small minority of folks that really need this are willing to pay for it.