Some exciting news has recently been announced for online businesses, or businesses who do any amount of ecommerce work. Pinners will soon be able to purchase directly from Pinterest, not even needing to go off-site.
Image courtesy of Pinterest.com
Pinterest—a popular social media platform resembling an online scrapbook for wishlists, recipes, and a variety of other assorted interests— is a relatively new platform, but a frequently used one. Its ad platform is also climbing the ranks, first with their Promoted Pins, and now with buyable pins.
So far, it looks like buyable pins are going to break into the platform only on iPhone and iPad users at first. There’s no word if or when buyable pins will be available for Android and desktop users, but my guess is that once they hammer out any issues and are ready to expand, it will eventually become available to all platforms.
How Buyable Pins Work
Buyable pins is a massive breakthrough for Pinterest, and will likely have a huge affect on marketers and pinners. Some exciting news: there is no added fee for either merchants or users to purchase directly from Pinterest. My guess is that this may change once the feature has really taken off, with Pinterest potentially charging merchants an extra fee once it’s been proven how valuable and profitable buyable pins can be—which I really believe they will be.
When the feature launches, Pinterest plans to have around 2 million items ready for users to purchase.
Starting at the end of this month, pinners with mobile apple devices will be able to purchase items directly off the pins themselves, without ever leaving Pinterest. Pinterest’s servers will never actually touch or be able to access customers’ card or payment information (options for which currently include Apple Pay or credit cards), keeping their information secure, but they still only need to enter their card information into the app once.
Pinners will be able to identify “buyable pins” by a blue tag on the pins themselves. Buyable pins will appear in every part of Pinterest, including search results, recommendations, and in the feeds. If using the search options, users will be able to place a price limit and prevent higher priced items from showing up in their feeds.
Image courtesy of Pinterest.com
The pins will still appear alongside regular pins, including those pinned by users and not marketers. This will give them a seamless integration that has worked particularly well for platforms like Twitter, and has so far kept Pinterest a favorite marketing tool.
What This Means
As an avid pinner myself (I use Pinterest as a marketing tool professionally, and a virtual cookbook with thousands of recipes saved on my personal account), I can only imagine how profitable the new buyable pins will be, both for Pinterest (once they inevitably start charging) and businesses alike.
Pinterest will now not only expose potential customers to new products and companies, it can lead to major increases in impulse purchases.
Before, if customers fell in love with something, they had to leave the site to purchase, potentially going through several more screens and/or transactions to do so. Now, it will be simple, and with purchases made easy, I’d be shocked if they didn’t increase.
Pinterest has been doing a lot of work to improve their value to marketers and businesses, recently refining targeting features for their already-launched Promoted Pins platform.
Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann stated that 80% of people purchasing from Pinterest were doing this from their mobile devices, hence their choice to start releasing the feature to mobile devices first.
Final Thoughts
While Pinterest’s Promoted Pins already seems to be fairing well for them, buyable pins could propel Pinterest into a top spot in the social media advertising ranks. Businesses could see big jumps in revenue, which I’m guessing will happen, leading to more and more businesses will using buyable pins.
What do you think about buyable pins? Would you create buyable pins for your business to sell products once it’s available?
The post Make Purchases Directly on Pinterest with New Buyable Pins appeared first on Ryan Shaw - Your Online Marketing Coach.
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