Pinterest has recently announced the rollout of several new features which will provide added convenience to shoppers, and which will at the same time solidify Pinterest in its role as your personal shopper. Early in March, several updates for buyable pins were rolled out by the platform, all of which are intended to personalize the shopping experience for Pinterest users and to make it easier for businesses to advertise their catalog of products to users. These new features are described below, and some of them are already available on the platform, while others are scheduled to be rolled out in the very near future.
Shopping for specific brands
One of the main updates rolled out by Pinterest is the capability to shop for items all offered by a specific brand. This is one of the options scheduled to be rolled out very soon, and it provides users with the ability to narrow down a search by using a single brand, which a user might prefer to do business with. Beneath a specific product pin, there will be an option that says ‘More from [brand name]’? This will navigate the user to a full page of pins which are exclusively offered by the brand which made the original pin.
A related update will likely be noticed by most users, in the sense that a great many more pins seem to be available on the platform. This will, in fact, be the case, since brands will have the ability to upload an entire catalog of their products, converting each individual item into a distinct pin which can be purchased by any shopper on the platform. Businesses wishing to upload their full catalog of products will have access to a brand-new dashboard which will help to keep all the new pins organized, as well as to help make them available for shoppers.
Shopping recommendation tool
Another of the new features launched by Pinterest is a shopping recommendation tool which will provide users with shopping ideas related to product pins they have saved or purchased in the past. Whenever a user views a pin which shops a bowl, this new feature can be invoked by tapping on the button labeled More Ideas. Behind the scenes, this feature will be collecting products which are in stock and available for purchase, and which are related to past pins which you may have saved or purchased.
This new feature is intended to create a very personal shopping experience for each Pinterest user, and to make it more convenient to find items of interest to the particular user. When using these recommendations supplied by the tool, users will have the option of either navigating to the online store to continue shopping, or they’ll be able the to save the specific pin to one of their boards for future reference.
Expansion of shopping ads
One of the less obvious updates included in this collection of new features is an expansion of the Shopping Ads which will be offered on Pinterest. Shopping Ads are now available by using the Ads Manager tool and can be used by all businesses which have an account on the platform. The ad type which is specified when creating a new ad will provide the capability of promoting specific product pins which a business owner wants to receive extra attention.
The objective of the new updates
According to Pinterest, the overall objective of offering these new updates is to personalize the shopping experience for all its users and to bring more buyable pins to Pinterest, especially those pins contained within search results. As a company spokesman recently announced, “These updates help retailers get in front of customers who are looking for related products, and it allows them to see items that match their unique style and taste”.
It is expected that some of these updates will find tremendous favor with Pinterest users, particularly the one which finds similar items for a user. Based on artificial machine intelligence, this tool may prove to be extremely popular for shoppers on the platform, because it allows you to browse for similar items which may have varying prices. Not only can this increase your shopping experience in terms of your personal taste, but it can also allow you to do some comparison shopping that may end up saving you money.
The context of the new updates
This latest list of updates on Pinterest comes close on the heels of other recent updates provided by the platform which are related to shopping on Pinterest. Last year, the platform introduced a feature which facilitated the conversion of buyable pins into product pins, while also adding features such as identifying whether or not the item was in stock. Another feature rolled out last year was the expansion of the audience for which Shopping Ads are offered. Originally made available to only a few selected businesses, the feature’s usage was greatly expanded and offered to hundreds of businesses on Pinterest.
In effect, Pinterest is allowing all businesses to feature items from an existing feed via Shopping Ads, by making use of the self-serve Ads Manager software product. To increase promotion of sales on the platform, Pinterest is also placing shopping results directly at the top of a user’s home feed, in response to a query which the user would have made on a specific topic, such as ‘party clothes’.
Many designers are praising the updates already because it allows them to become inspired, discover new and exciting products, and to shop and collect results easily on any given project they may be working on. Many have also declared the helpfulness of tools like the ‘More Ideas’ feature on any given pin because it saves them an additional search. The success of these updates, as well as some of its best-received updates of the past, have convinced Pinterest that more features related to the shopping experience should be rolled out in the future, and the platform has therefore announced its intention to continue this same policy.
