How Retailers Can Use Pinterest Shops to Drive Sales

Before you can set up your feed you have to create a data source. This is a file that contains a list of your products and their corresponding attributes. You can do this through Pinterest catalogs. 

This will enable the shop tab feature and populate the products you have in stock. From here, you can organize your products by category and feature up to 8 product groups. Pinterest will also curate recommendations for your customers based on their interests. 

Get More Discoverability 

Another reason to merge your shop with Pinterest: Your products will be prioritized in search. When Pinterest users search for shopping-related ideas on Pinterest, they’ll see recommended merchants and products based on the category. 

This gives your brand the opportunity to stand out which opens the door to new customers! Another way to get creative with your Shops is to use product tagging by creating a collections Pin. 

Once someone taps on a collections Pin, they’ll see the search icon in the bottom right. When clicked, white dots will appear on the Pin that users can then tap to view and shop those exact products or similar ones. This creates a seamless experience for shoppers to shop from a scene to make that inspiration a reality.

See Your Customer’s Journey from Pinterest to Purchase

With new Shops updates, retailers can see how customers are completing their path to purchase all summarized in the visualizations tool. Just head to the Analytics tab, then from there the Conversion Insights reporting page to measure the total impact of your organic Pins–which are not ads–along with your ads on your site traffic and online checkouts. 

You can even get more in-depth with your analytics by setting an attribution window which will refer to a defined number of days from when a user views, engages with or clicks on your Pin before buying something on your site. You can change the attribution window at any time to show 1-day, 7-day, and 30-day view.

Most importantly, Pinterest lets you keep an eye on your Pins progress with the Performance Over Time option. Here are the insights you will be looking at:

• Revenue: Total revenue influenced by your Pins and ads
• Checkouts: Number of checkouts stemming from your Pins and ads
• Average order value: Average value of checkouts stemming from your Pins and ads
• Purchasers: Number of purchasers stemming from interaction with your Pins and ads
• Page visits: Number of times people visited your website after seeing your content on Pinterest
• Add to cart: Number of times people added your products to their carts after interacting with your Pins
• Impressions: Number of times your Pins were on screen
• Pin clicks: Total number of times people clicked on your Pin to content on or off of Pinterest
• Saves: Total number of times your Pin was saved

If you own a small business and haven’t hopped on the Pinterest bandwagon by now, the benefits of Shops should certainly inspire you. 

Pinterest Shops is a unique way to boost sales, spread brand awareness, and learn more about your customers. It’s also a great way for you to create a more inspiring online shopping experience for your customers, all the while tying in other resourceful content that you save on your Pinterest from your website or blog.  

If you are just getting familiar with the world of Pinterest and want to know more about the basics and tools that we have to help, head to our Beginner’s Pinterest Guide blog post for the lay of the land and our Pin Planner How-to Guide to get started.