Pinterest launches new tools for merchants to curate, feature and measure their products to drive inspiration and sales

It just got easier for brands to set up shop, scale sales and prove impact on Pinterest.

Remember shopping? Remember heading out for a new pair of jeans and ending up with a whole new outfit? Remember how much…fun it was? Online shopping, on the other hand, hasn’t brought shoppers much joy. Until now.

In fact, alongside an unprecedented acceleration in e-commerce, holiday shopping started earlier than ever on Pinterest this year. Searches spiked in April for queries like “christmas gift ideas” (+3x yoy). And, the number of Pinners engaging with shopping surfaces on Pinterest has grown over 85% in the past six months. 

At Pinterest, we believe there’s a difference between shopping and buying: inspiration. A more inspired online shopping experience takes the best of shopping everywhere and makes it possible anywhere. 

Today we’re introducing our newest suite of merchant tools to help retailers reach customers this holiday season and beyond, including a new storefront profile, faster Catalogs feed ingestion, collections as a shopping ad format, video for collections, automatic bidding, conversion insights and analysis, and an improved product tagging test.

Here’s how we’re taking what retailers (and shoppers) loved about offline shopping and bringing it online:

New Ways To Set Up Shop

Merchant storefront profile & discovery: helping brands get discovered and inspiring more shoppers.

An updated profile enables merchants to transform their shop tab into a storefront with featured in-stock products organized by category, featured product groups and dynamically-created recommendations. 

And when Pinners search for shopping-related ideas on Pinterest, they’ll see recommended merchants based on the product category.

New product tagging: We’re testing an improved product tagging tool that gives merchants the ability to tag their own scene images with exact products.

The update makes it more seamless for shoppers to shop from a scene to make that inspiration a reality. 

Catalogs updates: a more intuitive interface so it’s easier to become a merchant on Pinterest. 

It’s now faster and simpler for merchants to upload their catalogs and activate shopping ads, with faster Catalog feed ingestion, video as the main hero image in collections, collections as a new shopping ad format, and a new preferred scheduling tool that lets retailers upload all products to Pinterest on their own time. 

                                                                                      _{Faster catalogs ingestion}

Some products just belong together. That’s why we’re bringing together Catalogs and collections to make collections a shopping ad format. As part of this update, 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. 

Advertisers who used collections saw a 6-18% increase in average total basket size. 

New Ways To Scale Sales

Automatic bidding for shopping: Set it and forget it with automatic bidding for catalog sales in ad campaigns.

Now, retailers can maximize their budget without constantly checking their buy. Automatic bidding for shopping means advertisers can dynamically adjust an ad group’s bid to aim for the maximum number of results. No guesswork. No waiting around. Just easy, automatic and effective. 

On average, advertisers who tested Automatic Bidding for Catalog Sales saw 28% more conversions when optimizing for the ‘Conversion’ event and nearly 29% more clicks when optimizing for ‘Click’ event for the same budget.

New Ways To Prove Impact

Conversion Analysis: a more granular look at conversion performance.

With new updates, retailers can see how customers are completing their path to purchase—all summarized in a familiar funnel—in the visualizations tool. Follow customers’ purchase journey and compare multiple attribution views to prove impact. 

These are just the latest updates in our growing suite of shopping solutions, all designed to help brands inspire more sales, while creating a richer experience that inspires customers to shop—not just to buy.  

For more information visit our shopping page for businesses. 

You can find high-resolution images here.

Sources

According to McKinsey, there’s been a 15 to 30% increase in the number of people who do most of their shopping online.

Growth in engagement with shopping surfaces — Pinterest Internal Data, Global, September 2020

 "Christmas gift" searches — Pinterest data:  April 2019-May 2020