When Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann shifted to an executive chairman role in June, bringing in Google’s Bill Ready as CEO, it left little doubt about the platform’s plans for eCommerce.
Within a week of that news, Pinterest introduced a slew of new merchant features and tools to make the platform more shoppable without losing its status as a place of inspiration. Now, it’s moving briskly to close the gap and make Pinterest the social site of choice for shoppers.
New merchant features launched in July include The Pinterest API for Shopping, Product Tagging for Pins, Shop Tab on Business Profiles and Video in Catalog.
No stranger to creating shoppable catalogs for eCommerce sites, Pinterest Senior Vice President and Head of Engineering Jeremy King told PYMNTS’ Karen Webster that the famously image-centric site was already working on a shopping catalog a few years prior to Ready’s arrival.
King left Walmart in 2019 after transforming its technology posture to better compete with Amazon specifically and eCommerce marketplaces generally. He also advised Wayfair, among others, as a board member while taking on Pinterest’s sales challenges that same year.
“We needed a canonical catalog — we built it over the last three years and now have hundreds of millions of items and feeds from everybody from Etsy to Wayfair to Walmart to Amazon,” he said. “We have a good baseline set up for a shopping ecosystem.”
By using the company’s computer vision technology to identify items within images and videos to tell Pinners where to buy them, King has built on Pinterest’s ability to identify someone’s taste and preferences based on what they browse. Now, the combination of a new application programming interface (API) and The Yes, a recently acquired personalized shopping platform, helps close sales gaps in the platform.
“Bill [Ready] is very careful to say that Pinterest is the only place you can go [online] when you don’t know what you want,” King said, nodding to discoverability as Pinterest’s superpower and how most use the site.
See also: Pinterest Makes Push to Reclaim Social Commerce With New CEO
He noted that 98% of Pinterest searches are unbranded — people looking for ideas to inspire an action — and a “help me find this item” option is a top requested feature. Now, Pinterest users will have the direct path to purchase they’ve been clamoring for.
“Once they discover, they want to be able to make that transaction happen — we call it inspiration to action,” he said. “The action part is what we’ve been working on in the last couple years.”
King was circumspect about Pinterest intermediating payments itself, even though market watchers are intently waiting for Bill Ready to move in this direction given his Braintree, PayPal and Google background.
Social is the New Battleground
Riding along with Bill Ready is his wide-ranging experience in payments and commerce for some of the world’s most successful online brands. His hiring marks a new era for the site.
It pits Pinterest — which has struggled to find a defined niche in online selling — against the eCommerce establishment, but its discovery engine rep will be handy as it competes not just with big eCommerce sites, but with social sites pushing embedded commerce and payments.
Remarking on how social media impulse buys often go awry, King told Webster, “It’s [on Pinterest] that you can find verified merchants that hopefully apply to exactly what you’re looking for versus some kind of impulse. As a matter of fact, shoppers on Pinterest have 85% bigger baskets than on other platforms because they’re coming here with intent.”
Converting inspiration and intent into sales is where the new features come into play. Per a July announcement, “In 2021, the number of Pinners engaging with shopping surfaces on Pinterest grew over 215%, and 89% of weekly Pinners use Pinterest for inspiration in their path to purchase.”
Building on that is the mission of repositioning a company with new leadership.
Recalling the heavy lift of building online catalogs for eBay and Walmart before APIs became commonly used, King said Pinterest has an edge thanks to its billions of images and advanced computer vision tech, which can associate products in images with specific retailers.
Even tiny merchants using Shopify and WooCommerce can be integrated directly, he said: “It’s one click, add their catalog to Pinterest. Even the smaller merchants have options now.”
And though Pinterest has the shopping surfaces and integrations in place, trying to make that invisible to the Pinner until they are ready to buy is the goal.
Read more: Why PayPal Buying Pinterest Wasn’t Such A Bad Idea
What Happens Now?
When asked whether a more commerce-focused Pinterest will attract a different kind of merchant or if existing merchants will adapt to the new focus, King said it’ll be a bit of both.
Retailers now have a landing page for their own business profile, and on the Shop Tab, “Pinners can click on Zazzle or Wayfair or Etsy and see their products,” he said.
That helps marketplace sellers reach the 400 million Pinners that come to Pinterest every month searching first for inspiration, and then for a purchase that completes the experience. King also said Shopify merchants can now buy and highlight ads that appear on Pinterest directly from inside the Shopify network.
“We’ll see what happens with the merchant platforms. I’ve been excited to see companies like Etsy and Home Depot and Target and Zazzle who have hundreds of millions of items expand their catalogs.” Same with Amazon, he added.
As it moves deeper into seller country, Pinterest will need to carefully vet sellers, as the stakes are higher for a commerce site than for a social site offering visual inspiration at no charge.
King ran the Trust and Safety teams at eBay and Walmart, and his twin brother did so for eBay, as well. The twins know a thing — or two — about vetting sellers and products for large eCommerce operations.
Oftentimes, one-click buys on social platforms can deliver a bad shopper experience — sometimes arriving up to six weeks later. It’s something that Pinterest is particularly careful about, King told Webster.
“We launched a verified merchant program, so we know these are reputable sellers whose products actually get shipped,” he said. “It’s a super important part of Pinterest because you don’t want to be inspired, then disappointed.”
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