Pinterest Buyable Pins - Are they Effective

Pinterest Buyable pins launched in June 2015 and early reports suggest that this feature is driving new customer acquisition. Pinterest is a social bookmarking site that drives 100 million monthly active users and this year it focused on driving quality sales for businesses. The goal of this move is to not only drive engagement, but also tangible sales for businesses.

What are Buyable Pins?

Buyable pins allow users of Pinterest to purchase products from inside pinned items. The buttons are blue in colour and sit next to the familiar red pins. Pinterest has made it easy for users to find these buyable pins by allowing a filter in search to show only buyable pins. For example, if a user searches for a 'dress', they can select the 'see more' option and click on the '$' sign. Within this filter, users can also set a price range and browse products within their price range.

How Do Users Check Out?

Users can pay with both a credit card or Apple Pay and Pinterest can store credit card details for future transactions. Once the purchase has been made, users can continue to pin and search as usual and an encrypted message will be sent to the merchant.

How many businesses have launched Buyable Pins?

Pinterest launched this campaign with over 2 million buyable pins from major retailers such as Macy's, Nordstrom, Michael's and Kate Spade. Pinterest also chose to optimize mobile shopping on the platform, considering 80% of people purchasing on Pinterest are doing it from mobile.

How successful are Buyable Pins?

Pinterest has announced that the number of pins with the 'Buy it' button has doubled since the launch of the new feature from 30 million to 60 million. Beyond this, Pinterest isn't being very forthcoming about the success of the feature however Shopify merchants have seen 2x higher conversion rates.

Is Pinterest making money?

Pinterest isn't making money off each transaction but plans to make money by offering merchants the option to promote Buyable Pins.