Pinterest Adds Several Features for Merchants, Including New Storefront Profiles

Pinterest rolled out several tools for merchants on its platform Tuesday with an eye toward the holiday shopping season and beyond. The company wrote in a blog post Tuesday, “It’s no secret that people miss in-store experiences—walking by a storefront and feeling inspired. The pandemic has changed retail forever and accelerated online shopping in a way that no one saw coming. Along with this surge in ecommerce, the number of Pinners engaging with shopping surfaces on Pinterest has grown over 85% in the past six months. And, in anticipation for holiday joy, shopping started earlier than ever on Pinterest this year. Searches spiked in April for queries like ‘Christmas gift ideas,’ up three times year-over-year (we saw these spikes in June and July in previous years).” The new features were highlighted by an updated profile for merchants, which enables them to transform their shop tab into a storefront, complete with featured in-stock products organized by category, featured product groups and dynamically created recommendations. When Pinners search for shopping-related ideas, they will see recommended merchants based on the product category. Pinterest is testing an improved product tagging tool that enables merchants to tag their own scene images with exact products, making it seamless for shoppers to go from a scene directly to the retailer’s site to complete the checkout process. The process of uploading catalogs and activating shopping ads was sped up with quicker catalog feed ingestions, and catalogs are now part of Pinterest’s collections format, making collections a new ad format and giving merchants the ability to use video as the main hero image. Pinterest explained, “Some products just belong together. That’s why we’re bringing together catalogs and collections. As part of this collections format, brands can now also select a main asset and a corresponding product group to create an inspiring, multi-image ad unit. Additionally, we’re launching the option to use video as a hero in a collections ad unit to further tell a brand story.” Pinterest said advertisers using collections saw increases of 6% to 18% in their average total basket size. Advertisers now have access to automatic bidding for catalog sales in ad campaigns, enabling them to set their budget and dynamically adjust the bid for ad groups to achieve the maximum number of results. Pinterest said that on average, advertisers who tested automatic bidding for catalog sales saw 28% more conversions when optimizing for that event and 29% more clicks when optimizing for that event. Finally, Pinterest rolled out new conversion analysis analytics so that retailers can learn how customers are completing their purchase journeys and compare multiple attribution views. The company wrote, “At Pinterest, we believe there’s a difference between shopping and buying: inspiration. A more inspired online shopping experience takes the best of shopping offline (like visually browsing and getting inspired by curated scenes in shops and catalogs) and makes it possible online.”