Updated November 11, 2019

9 Ways to Sell on Pinterest in 2019 – 2020

For the last few months I’ve been searching for furniture and home decor ideas for my new home. Not as a Pinterest Management Services expert but as a everyday consumer. I couldn’t believe how many stores have completely abandoned their Pinterest account. For example, as I was saving images from Restoration Hardware about pieces that I wanted to purchase I noticed that they had a verified account but no images. Nada!

As you can see in the image above they have over 80K followers with 5.5 million monthly viewers. How is that even possible if they haven’t pinned (meaning saved) a single image?

Just like me and many other people, Pinterest users have a shopping mindset. They are on Pinterest looking to fill their homes with things that inspire them and things they need. Did you know that 84% of weekly Pinners come to Pinterest before deciding what to buy next (source: Gfk, Path to Purchase study, Nov. 2018) & 83% of weekly Pinners have made a purchase based on content they saw from brands on Pinterest?

Pinterest Beats Facebook and Instagram in This Key Metric

This new data speaks for itself. According to Cowen & Co. recently found that Pinterest is the leader among social media companies when it comes to U.S. product searches and shopping beating Facebook and Instagram. That’s pretty impressive since it reaches a smaller audience than Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, with over 322 million monthly active users.

As someone who offers Pinterest Management Services I’m thinking why would Restoration Hardware not give a crap about Pinterest? I’m absolutely baffled because clearly people want their stuff. Look at the screenshot below. You’ll notice that so many Pinners have created boards around “Restoration Hardware”. That should give any brand or business an indication that they could be making more sales if they leveraged Pinterest. 

Restoration Hardware is just one of many brands that are completely ignoring Pinterest. I guess that’s great news for their competition! 

Pinterest Management Services Reveals Why All Home Decor and Fashion Verticals Must Leverage Pinterest Marketing

Fortunately, for those of you who are in the home decor and fashion verticals you are going to get a bigger boost from Pinterest because so many of your competitors are not on Pinterest.  You see, Pinterest’s goal is to make it easy for people to shop for anything that Pinners see while they’re looking for inspiration. With that in mind here are nine different ways people on Pinterest will find your products:

1) Shopping Search

Product Pins will have up-to-date pricing and stock information, with links that go directly to the checkout page on the retailer’s site where you can buy in a few clicks. Just look for the new shopping tag icon (as shown below), and you’ll know it’s in stock. Product Pins are replaced with the older Buyable Pin format.

According to Pinterest with more in-stock Product Pins, there are more products to search. Just search for a product like “midi skirt”, “men’s watches” or “outdoor furniture” and shopping results appear on the top of home feed. To start shopping, click “see more”.  

 

2) Shop a brand

Shop a brand (pictured below) is a new dedicated section from retailers that is starting to roll out beneath Product Pins. You’ll soon be able to dive into a brand’s catalog by clicking “more from [brand]”.

 

3) Personalized shopping recommendations with “More Ideas”

Alongside style, home, beauty and DIY boards, Pinterest users will see in-stock ideas related to what they’ve been saving, to match their style.

When Pinners click “More ideas” Pinterest will show you some shopping ideas they have picked for you. Pinterest users can tap on the + sign (via mobile) so they can add the image to their board, or they can click the pin to go straight to the check-out on the retailer’s site.

 

4) Catalogs

What is Catalogs?

Catalogs allow businesses to easily upload their product catalog, organize their products, and allow Pinners to discover and shop their content.

With Catalogs, businesses will be able to mass generate product pins and organize their product pins into product groups. They can promote those product groups as Shopping Ads through Ads Manager.

Who can use Catalogs?

• Only business profiles with a claimed domain will be allowed to use Catalogs.
• In order to use Catalogs, you need to be able to provide a data source and your own hosting. Click here for Setup to review specific requirements for setting up your data source.
• At this time Catalogs is currently only available for retail and ecommerce businesses in US, CA, UK, IR, AU, and NZ.

 

What is a data source?

• A data source (also commonly known as a product catalog, product feed, or data feed) is a file consisting of a list of products and corresponding attributes that are structured in a specific way, to be processed for dynamic pin creation.
• A data source is required to use Pinterest Catalogs. See the data source specification page for details on the technical requirements to create a data source for Pinterest.
• Pinterest cannot support multiple data sources per profile at this time.

 

5) Promoted Pins

If you want your products to get in front of your target audience right away you can buy Pinterest ads.

RELATED: Why Investing in Promoted Pins is NOT Optional

 

6) Visual search tool

One of the ways people discover products on Pinterest is with the visual search tool. In fact, Pinterest is seeing monthly visual search jump activity from 250 million in February 2017 to 600 million in February 2018. When using this feature on mobile devices just pinch to zoom in on any object you see within a Pin to automatically start a visual search and instantly discover similar Pins.

 

Pinterest users can also use the Pinterest browser extension to do visual searches with any image you see on Google Chrome or Firefox.  When you click on the visual search tool as shown on the top image (red arrow pointing) Pinterest will show you similar results as shown below.

 

7) Shop the Look

Another ambitious visual search tool Pinterest has produced is called Shop the Look and it is specifically designed for fashion and home decor pins.

Shop the Look pins have white dots (as shown below) hovering over the different parts of an outfit or a room. When people tap on the white dots Pinterest will show the exact or similar products featured in the pin. When they’re ready to buy, your customers can click through to your site to check out. As a Pinterest Management Services expert I love this because this is another way to make more sales on Pinterest.

 

If you have a Pinterest business profile, Shop the Look allows you to manually tag multiple products within the same lifestyle image. Here’s how to do that:

1. Click the red + on the top right corner on your profile page and click “Create pin”.
2. Upload an image and add a Pin title, description, destination URL.
3. Click on the grey shopping tag.
4. Click the product you want to tag.
5. Add the product URL or affiliate link – keep in mind that we do not support URL shorteners.
6. Pick a product image.
7. Repeat steps 4-6 for all products you want to tag in this Pin.
8. Click “Done”.
9. Choose a board to save your Shop the Look Pin to.

 

You can edit the placement of the white dots at any time by clicking in the pin close up. Edits should show within a few hours of editing the pin.

When you add a product URL via the add a Pin flow, you’ll create a Product Pin that lives on a protected board. Only you can view your protected boards, and they are not visible to other people on Pinterest. You can access your protected boards by scrolling to the bottom of your profile, past your secret boards.

 

8) The “Lens”

Pinterest rolled out its first visual search tool called “Lens” in 2015. It’s a real-time visual search tool embedded in the camera of the Pinterest App. It allows you to discover products and services anytime you point your Pinterest app & phone camera at something.

 

How Do I Use The Lens?

Did you ever spot something you loved but couldn’t find the words to describe it? Pinterest has solved that problem with the Lens. Well, all you need to do is open the Pinterest app on your mobile device and tap the camera icon in the search bar. Next, pinch to zoom or tap on a specific object to focus your camera on (as shown on the image above), tap the button to snap a picture and voila Pinterest will show you pages of images of those exact or similar objects (as shown on the right image above).

Top categories for Lens searches:

• Fashion
• Home decor
• Art
• Food
• Products
• Animals
• Outfits
• Beauty
• Vehicles
• Travel

 

Top trending Lens searches:

• Tattoos
• Nails
• Sunglasses
• Jeans
• Cats
• Wedding dress
• Plants
• Quilts
• Brownies
• Natural hair

 

9) Pinterest is rolling out new ways for people to shop their favorite brands from personalized ideas at the top of home feed and browsable catalogs alongside Pins.

In addition to personalized shopping hubs at the top of your home feed, an updated shopping section is rolling out below Pins, making it easy to browse into the catalogs of brands of all sizes like Target, Birdies Slippers, Joybird, The Tie Bar, and Parachute.

For retailers, these features provide another way to reach Pinners while they’re shopping on Pinterest and looking to discover products they’ll love.

A new study from Neustar released today looks at the effectiveness of shopping ads, and participating retail brands saw a 2x higher return on ad spend on Pinterest than social media and a 1.3x higher return than on paid search.

“Pinterest has been an important brand awareness and acquisition tool for our brand. As home is one of the most popular categories on Pinterest, and users regularly look to the platform to find inspiration for their interiors, Pinterest has provided us with a natural destination to connect with our growing community. We’ve found that people increasingly use Pinterest to search for specific types of products and vignettes, and Pinterest’s growing suite of Shopping tools helps us to meet that customer demand, providing those shoppers with relevant options from Parachute.”  – Ariel Kaye, Founder and CEO of Parachute

As you can see there are several ways Pinners uses Pinterest to look for things they want to buy to help them with their own unique style and taste.

Well there you have it! I hope you found my Pinterest Management Services quick tips for the day helpful. If you can’t keep up with Pinterest’s ever changing algorithm, rules, and tactics or you are struggling to get more traffic and sales consider taking the lifetime version of my Pinterest Marketing for Business video course. You’ll receive email support and I’ll always update you on what’s working and what’s not on Pinterest so that you get found first ahead of your competition.