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Social Media Ecommerce Pinterest

Pinterest introduces new commerce integrations

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By Kendra Barnett, Associate Editor

July 7, 2022 | 4 min read

Pinterest is following in the footsteps of Facebook and Instagram by investing more deeply in native commerce capabilities. The site has unveiled a new suite of tools designed to drive engagement and conversion for sellers, including an all-new shopping-centered API.

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Pinterest has rolled out a suite of new commerce tools

Pinterest has announced it is rolling out new shopping features designed to help merchants reach the platform’s 400 million monthly users in new ways.

The new tools include a shopping API, product tagging for Pins, a video-based product catalog and a shopping tab on business profiles.

“At Pinterest, our goal is to turn inspiration into action, and our vision for shopping is to make it possible to buy anything Pinners are inspired by on the platform,” said Jeremy King, senior vice-president of engineering at Pinterest, in a blog post on Wednesday. He explained that the new features are valuable for retailers and brands because they create potential for high engagement at the top of the funnel, when users are seeking inspiration at the beginning of their shopping journey.

The crown jewel of the new commerce tools is the Pinterest API for Shopping. With the API, the platform is offering new shopping and media measurement capabilities, including product metadata management, which the company said in an announcement is meant to “enable more efficient improved data quality for merchant products.” The company claims that the API has proven to improve the accuracy of products’ price and availability data by 97%.

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A number of merchants are already using the API, including popular marketplace Zazzle. “Pinterest’s new API has allowed Zazzle to efficiently and effectively promote hand-curated design collections via shopping campaigns,” said the organization’s chief marketing technology officer Chris Lentini in a statement. Lentini went on to say that Zazzle is already seeing “promising early performance” and hopes to leverage the API to better spotlight its network of independent creators.

Alongside its new API, Pinterest is also rolling out new product tagging, making posts on the platform more shoppable. In essence, retailers can tag their products in pinned images. With tags, users are given a seamless buying option – not only from product Pins, but from lifestyle- and inspiration-type images too. Pinterest said that in early tests, platform users expressed 70% higher shopping intent on product tags in scene and brand images than on tags in standalone product Pins.

Pinterest is also investing more deeply in video ads – with the company noting that such formats see 158% higher click-through rates than static ads on the platform. As a part of its foray into video, the site will now offer merchants the option to use video content in their product catalogs.

Finally, the popular moodboard-making site said it’s debuting the Shop Tab on business profiles, essentially integrating a virtual storefront for brands using Pinterest. With this feature, the company aims to help retailers capture more high-intent shopping traffic. It noted that 30% of Shopify sellers on Pinterest see their first attributed checkout via the business profile Shop Tab.

It’s an opportune time to debut new commerce features; last year, the number of users engaging with shopping tools on Pinterest ballooned 215%, and nearly nine in 10 weekly users utilized the site on their buying journey.

The news of the shopping tools adds to a string of recent changes at Pinterest meant to advance the platform’s advertising and commerce capabilities. The company yesterday announced it is expanding its efforts in the Latin American market by rolling out ads in Colombia, Argentina and Chile. Last month, just weeks ahead of the appointment of ex-Google exec Bill Ready as chief executive officer, Pinterest unveiled a new immersive, multi-page ad format called Ideas. The platform is likely seeking to expand its advertising capabilities to better compete with ad-driven competitors such as Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.

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