Earlier this year, Pinterest announced Buyable Pins as a “simple and secure” way for users to buy products right on Pinterest. This week at the Shop.org 2015 Digital Summit, the company announced the addition of new platform integrations and the availability of the feature to many more merchants.
Do you plan on taking advantage of Buyable Pins on Pinterest? Do you expect Pinterest to be a major help in driving sales? Are you already seeing success with it? Discuss in the comments.
“Pinterest is a catalog of ideas,” a spokesperson for Pinterest told WebProNews when the feature was first unveiled. “Our mission is not just to show you ideas, but to help you bring them to life. Buyable Pins is the next step in this journey, as we bring the joy of discovering products in your favorite stores offline, online.”
With Buyable Pins, users can buy things on Pinterest when they see a blue price and “Buy it” button. There’s also a price filter in the search filters for those looking for something specific, which automatically makes the functionality more useful and turns Pinterest into much more of a shopping service in general, even if there remains plenty to do beyond shopping.
The user can tap “Buy it” when they’re ready to check out, and pay with Apple Pay or credit card. Once Pinterst has the personal info, it is stored so the user doesn’t have to keep entering it every time. Pinterest has partnered with payment processors like Stripe to handle this so it doesn’t store the info itself.
Right at launch, Pinterest had millions of Buyable Pins. This week, Pinterest said it doubled the number in the three months since, with over 60 million of them now out there.
Also this week, the company announced the addition of three new ecommerce platform integrations: IBM Commerce, Magento, and Bigcommerce (which was also part of the Twitter buy button announcement last week). That brings the total to five platform partners as Buyable Pins launched with support from Shopify and Demandware.
Magento’s marketing team said in a blog post:
Magento merchants can now sell their products directly on Pinterest through Buyable Pins. Together with our partner Creatuity, Magento has launched the new Pinterest Buyable Pins extension, designed to work seamlessly with your Magento online store.
Merchants can now reach millions of Pinterest mobile app users to drive incremental sales, new customer acquisition and improve mobile conversions. Buyable Pins make it easier than ever for shoppers to buy their favorite finds and Pins right from their Pinterest iPhone or iPad app. And, the best part is that Pinterest won’t take any cut from your sales as Buyable Pins is currently free of charge to merchants.
Tracey Wallace at BigCommerce wrote:
For retailers, the introduction of Buyable Pins means Pinterest is now an opportunity for merchants to grow revenue by expanding into new and innovates sales channels, reaching consumers wherever they naturally discover products. Pins will be a crucial part of a multi-channel marketing strategy.
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Overall, the key benefit of Buyable Pins is the ability to drive customer acquisition at no additional cost to the merchant.
Pinterest also announced the roll-out of new Buyable Pins from Bloomingdale’s, Wayfair, DVF, Steven Alan and thousands of new merchants from Demandware and Shopify.
“In the first few months of the program, merchants are seeing that Buyable Pins are driving new customers, adding incremental sales at no cost and delivering higher mobile conversions,” a spokesperson for Pinterest told us in an email.
A study from Shopify found that Buyable Pins from its merchants showed a 2x higher conversion rate than other pins on mobile.
If the ecommerce platform you use doesn’t currently support Buyable Pins, you can sign up for the waitlist here, and they’ll let you know about new integration opportunities.
It’s worth noting that the presence of Buyable Pins are likely to make users think about Pinterest as more a shopping destination in general, which should in turn help drive growth for Pinterest as an advertising platform with Promoted Pins. This supports Pinterest’s pitch to advertisers to save some room in their search budgets.
Are you interested in using Buyable PIns? Do you expect them to be as effective or more effective than similar offerings from Facebook and Twitter? Share your thoughts in the comments.
Image via Pinterest
