Learn To Speak Instagram. It’s The Future For Small Retail Businesses

Belmiraz is a French 21-year-old with over a hundred thousand Instagram followers. And she’s never used a desktop computer to log in and manage her clothes-and-accessories store on Tictail, an ecommerce platform for small businesses. She sets up product descriptions, processes orders, and messages customers off her smartphone. And she’s making tens of thousands of dollars in sales each month. Tictail cofounder Carl Rivera tells me this in his Manhattan office, sipping espresso from a mug that says “What would Belmiraz do?” He’s stocked the office with these to remind his staff that they’re building products and services for a new generation of entrepreneurs, whose go-to behaviors can be a window into the future of ecommerce. The majority of its sellers are less than 35 years old, 65% of that group runs businesses almost exclusively on mobile, and they do their marketing overwhelmingly through Instagram (it drives 30% of Tictail’s total traffic). Tictail’s most recent Belmiraz-inspired strategy is about mobile video. It’s the lingua franca of social media and a fast way to show how a product looks and feels. This week Tictail is launching features that let vendors record or upload videos in the Tictail mobile app, share them directly to Instagram, add shoppable links for those Instagram shares, and decorate them with custom stickers of their own store logos and special offers. Read more at Forbes.