Pinterest Rolls Out New Social Shopping Features for Mobile Payments Users

Social media systems have long been considering shopping options as a way to take advantage of their often-enormous user bases and actually make some money themselves. Yet it doesn’t seem to always go off as planned, or even hoped for. Some recent changes at Pinterest, meanwhile, look to shake things up considerably and hopefully improve the chances that shoppers will make some purchases via the social media site.

Pinterest’s new moves featured a launch and a bit of a revamp. First, the company rolled out its Catalogs service, giving brands the opportunity to effectively turn Pinterest into a giant Wish Book by uploading multiple images, organizing the products by category, and then letting the images serve as Product Pins. Additionally, reports suggest a new “more ideas” button will also come into play, allowing users to see other items similar to those that are in stock at other retailers.

That’s just for starters, though; the revamp involved brought Shopping Ads to the Ads Manager tool, which allows advertisers to roll out complete Shopping campaigns from a self-service interface. With Shopping Ads now available in such a fashion, reports note, this puts Pinterest on par with Bing, Facebook, and Google, who all offer similar services.

Given reports that 84 percent of weekly Pinterest users use the app before making buying decisions—and an almost disturbingly similar 83 percent have made purchases based on Pinterest content—this likely will prove helpful for businesses trying to pull Pinterest into their marketing mix. It’s already worked quite well for some; Rothy’s saw referral traffic from Pinterest grow over 35 percent in month-to-month comparisons using Pinterest’s Promoted Pins, while Room & Board noted a 51-fold return on spending using Promoted Pins. The comparatively disappointing Shopping Ads, meanwhile, brought in a meager 33-fold return, which really shouldn’t disappoint anyone at all.

It’s readily apparent that Pinterest can have some real impact on a business’ marketing capabilities, and it will likely have that impact for some time to come.