The Pinterest Effect On eCommerce Traffic

While it’s not at the top of the list for how consumers follow retail on social media (though it is on the list), Pinterest is providing a boon for a few specific eCommerce companies.

The Wall Street Journal has shared data on online merchants that appear to be a perfect fit for the Pinterest user, as both groups tend focus on aspirational shopping — and generate a substantial amount of referral traffic from the social commerce site as a result.

The story cites that Bay Area-based furniture retailer Dot & Bo — which focuses on trendy decor as it blends shopping with lifestyle content and whose product offerings, as The WSJ attests, lend themselves to being “pinnable” — saw 73.4 percent of its social traffic from May through October of this year come from Pinterest.

Wedding retail appears to be another online merchant category that benefits greatly from Pinterest, with the WSJ story pointing out that Kleinfeld Bridal and diamond retailer Zales get 67.6 percent and 29.7 percent, respectively, of their social media referrals from the platform.

Retailers that gravitate toward a crafty aesthetic are yet another group that jives with Pinterest, as exhibited by Etsy getting close to 40 percent of its referral traffic from it, while Pottery Barn brings in 46.7 percent of its own from the site.

Ari Rosenstein, senior director for corporate marketing at SimilarWeb, remarked to The WSJ that for Pottery Barn to have the same number of followers on Pinterest as the (much larger) Target is “pretty impressive.”

As for the secret to companies that gain strong referral traffic from the social curation site, Rosenstein puts forward the notion that “Basically, they know how to do Pinterest well. And there’s a type of user on Pinterest, it attracts a certain type of person, and these companies know there is an overlap with their audience.”