Iran’s Instagram Shops Are as Large as Its E-Commerce Platforms

For a year this desk has published numerators without a denominator. We could tell you what a company sold and not what fraction of the market that was, because no Iranian source measured the market. Every share figure in circulation traced back to a company describing itself. In August the Tehran E-Commerce Association published a 91 page study that does the measurement, says on its own cover that it is the first of its kind in Iran, and it arrived at the desk this week.

It contains two findings worth a reader’s time. The first is that online retail in Iran is much smaller than the conversation around it assumes. The second is that the largest online selling channel in the country may not be a platform at all.

Online retail is 4.8 percent of Iranian retail

The denominator is built rather than asserted, which is what makes it usable. Household spending comes from the Statistical Centre’s income and expenditure survey, which is a sample and which the report says plainly undercounts eight categories; those were rebuilt from customs import data, industrial workshop data and the World Gold Council consumption series. The scale of that correction is its own lesson: mobile phones came out at 14.1 in the raw survey against about 170 in customs import value for the same year. Company, guild, cooperative and government spending are added on top from four further sources.

Two limits travel with every number above and should never be dropped. Food and other fast-moving consumer goods are excluded, as are services, housing and communications, so this is a retail-goods denominator and not total consumer spending. And the online numerator is built from what the association’s member companies sent in, so it measures those members rather than every online seller in Iran.

The number Digikala published does not match

This is where an outside measurement earns its keep. The Digikala record on this site carries a figure from the company’s own annual report for the year to 20 March 2025: online retail is 6.4 percent of total Iranian retail. The association, measuring the same country in the same year, puts it at 4.8 percent. The company’s figure is a third higher than the association’s.

We are not in a position to say which is right, and we will not pretend otherwise. Neither publishes a full reconciliation, and the denominators may differ. A wider definition of retail, one that takes in food and services, changes the online numerator as well as the base, so the direction of the effect cannot be read off the denominator alone; scope may explain the gap, and it may not. What we can say is that the gap exists, that it sits between a company describing its own market and a trade body measuring it, and that until this month only the first of those two numbers existed. Both are now on the Digikala record, next to each other, with their sources.

The other channel has no platform

The report’s second chapter sizes social commerce, and it is the part that should change how people talk about Iranian e-commerce. About 130,000 active Instagram shops were identified and their observable data pulled for the seven years to March 2025; the owners were then surveyed by telephone and SMS on a stratified sample with Neyman optimal allocation, and the market was estimated from the modelled result.

The estimate is about 89 thousand billion toman for the year to 20 March 2025, which the report describes as comparable to, and roughly equal to, the sales of the country’s large e-commerce platforms. On the report’s own two numbers the subtraction can be done, and it is ours rather than theirs: 4.8 percent of 1,648.6 is about 79, a little below the Instagram estimate. That is as far as the evidence goes. The platform figure covers the association’s member platforms, not every formal online seller, and the Instagram figure is a modelled estimate from a survey sample, so the two numbers support a comparison of what was measured and not a ranking of the channels.

The split between them is by product type rather than by size. Formal platforms are established in standardised, higher-priced goods where a buyer wants a warranty and a return policy: mobile phones, digital goods, gold. Social commerce leads in visual, varied, taste-driven goods. Fashion and apparel alone is about 24.1 thousand billion toman on Instagram, the largest single group, and the report puts that at roughly five times what the online retail platforms sell in the same category. Home and kitchen, art and novelty goods and cosmetics follow, and about two thirds of the value sits in those four groups.

One figure stops this being a story about Instagram replacing shops: about 57 percent of these businesses also have physical premises. For most of them the account is a channel rather than the company.

Two more things in the report that nobody else has

Credit has become a quarter of platform spending. Buy now, pay later went from 2 percent of platform sales value in the year to March 2021 to 25 percent in the year to March 2025. One in four toman spent on these platforms is now borrowed at the checkout. The desk has written about instalment credit from the lenders’ side; this is the first figure we have seen from the retail side.

Tehran is 47.7 percent of platform sales, and the report notes this as decentralisation against earlier years while conceding Tehran remains the centre. Per person, Tehran province spent about 2.9 million toman on association platforms in the year to March 2025, against 1.48 million in Alborz and 1.03 million in Gilan. Tehran households put more than 5 percent of their spending through these platforms, the highest share in the country.

The largest thing Iranians buy is gold

The report’s corrected category table, which we read from the rendered page rather than the text layer, explains something the executive summary only hints at. It gives the online share twice, 4.8 percent including gold and 5.6 percent excluding it, and the reason that gap exists is that jewellery, gold and coins is the single largest category of Iranian household retail spending. It was 25.1 percent of the total in the year to March 2020 and 27.1 percent in the year to March 2025. For at least six years, roughly a quarter of what Iranian households spend on retail goods has gone into gold, and almost none of it is bought on a platform.

Read the rest of that table as shares rather than as amounts, because seven years of Iranian nominal toman figures mostly measure the currency rather than the behaviour. On that basis the shifts between the year to March 2020 and the year to March 2025 are modest and legible: appliances and audiovisual up from 14.4 to 17.4 percent, mobile phones up from 8.4 to 9.9, home and kitchen up from 9.4 to 10.1, while fashion and apparel fell from 16.7 to 14.3 and cosmetics from 9.7 to 6.5. Iranian households moved money toward durable and high-value goods and away from soft goods, which is what households do when they expect the currency to keep falling.

That also sharpens the social commerce finding above rather than softening it. Fashion is the category losing share of the national wallet, and it is simultaneously the largest and fastest part of the Instagram market. The category is not shrinking so much as moving channel.

One column of that table does not add up

We checked the table against itself before using it, which is the desk’s standing rule for any figure that has to reconcile. Six of its seven annual columns sum to their own printed total, several of them exactly. The earliest column, the year to March 2019, does not. Its fourteen categories sum to 82.66 against a printed total of 123.8, a gap of 41 thousand billion toman that no line in the table accounts for.

So every share in this piece is calculated from the year to March 2020 onward, and the first year is excluded. That matters more than a footnote, because the excluded column is the one that would have carried the most dramatic claim available here: on its face it shows gold rising from about 1 percent of retail spending to 27 percent in seven years. That would have been the headline of this piece, and it rests entirely on a column that does not reconcile. On the six columns that do, gold was already a quarter of Iranian retail before the period began. The remaining table, guild spending by trade classification, is still unread and is named in our extraction file rather than used.

Revised 2026-09-14: the title and the channel comparison were brought in line with the evidence after an external review; the platform figure covers member platforms and the Instagram figure is a modelled estimate, so the piece now compares rather than ranks. See Corrections.

Cite as: Tehran Index, “Iran’s Instagram Shops Are as Large as Its E-Commerce Platforms”, 12 September 2026. All market figures from گزارش تجارت الکترونیک ایران, the Iran E-Commerce Report of the Tehran E-Commerce Association, 91 pages, produced 24 August 2026, covering the seven years to 20 March 2025; executive summary pages 5 and 6, confirmed by reading the rendered pages on 12 September 2026. The comparison of about 89 against about 79 is Tehran Index arithmetic on the report’s own two figures and is not printed by the report. The 6.4 percent figure is from Digikala’s own annual report for the year to 20 March 2025, already on the Digikala record. Registry counts n=403 records, 376 public, 303 public companies, 874 public facts, queried 12 September 2026. Dollar equivalents at the desk’s audited 2024-25 average of about 70,000 toman to the dollar, applied only to that year and marked at each use. No company valuation appears here.