Winnipeg business says Instagram suspended account, cutting them off from 12,000 customers

A Winnipeg business wants answers after waking up one morning to find their Instagram account had been suspended without notice or explanation, cutting them off from more than 12,000 customers.

Racks of colourful luxury-brand clothes, shoes and accessories fill the inside of the So Over It Luxury Consignment storefront on Corydon Avenue. The carefully curated displays seem ripe for a post on Instagram – which is exactly where the company finds most of its customers.

"It's a massive amount, definitely over 50 per cent," said Jordan Blair, the co-founder of the company that finds and resells luxury brands on consignment across Canada.

"We rely heavily, as do most small businesses, on the different social platforms."

Earlier this week, she almost lost it all.

"We woke up a couple of days ago to realize that our Instagram account had been suspended," Blair told CTV News. "We were given no reasoning, and it's almost impossible to get a hold of someone. We realized that you can be suspended with no notice or actual explanation that's specific to you."

The only explanation she received from Instagram was an email telling her the account, or some activity on it, did not follow community guidelines.

Blair said her business has had the Instagram account since So Over It Luxury Consignment was started in 2017, amassing more than 12,000 followers. In the more than five years running the account, she said they never had any issues like this before.

After a stressful 24 hours frantically reaching out to Instagram for an explanation and setting up a new account, Blair says their original account was reactivated without further explanation.

"We're sorry we got this wrong and that you weren't able to use Instagram for a while," reads an email Blair received from Instagram. "Sometimes we need to take action to help keep our community safe."

Despite their attempts for an explanation, Blair said she and her staff have heard nothing from Instagram.

But the response from the community has been overwhelming.

"We had just a flooding of business owners reach out and talk about how they've had their account suspended for months and months, and that is extremely detrimental to a small business, it could really cripple you."

It's a concern raised by SeoRhin Yoo, a Manitoba policy analyst with the Canadian Federation for Independent Business.

"It is really unfair for a lot of the small businesses that make a living essentially off of the platform."

Yoo said the federation saw a dramatic rise in the number of small businesses using social media.

She said those businesses are trying to keep up with the long list of terms and conditions, but says social media companies need to do more to protect them.

"I think social media platforms really need to assume responsibility in these cases," she said. "They need to provide clear communication, and they need to do it effectively providing reasons as to why accounts are being suspended."

The whole situation has forced So Over It Luxury Consignment to rethink how it does its business.

"We realize that the dependency on these social media channels to be able to sell and communicate with your clients is really scary," she said. "That you could wake up and 13,000 followers who really that's your whole community could be taken away from you."

In the days following the incident, Blair said she and her staff have shifted how they do their business so they aren't so reliant on social media.

She is warning other businesses about the whole experience.

"If you're completely reliant on one sales channel or one social network, then you're really in big trouble if something like this happens to you," she said. "Our advice to small businesses is really just to make sure that you have diverse tools to be selling, and to be housing that client information."

CTV News has reached out for a comment from Meta, which owns Instagram, but has yet to hear back.