Big Retailers Turn To Pinterest To Drive E-Commerce Sales
By Anna Rose Welch, Editorial & Community Director, Advancing RNA
New Pinterest APIs transform customers’ online shopping experiences; makes shopping more interactive, more social
A new Pinterest development is set to take the retail world by storm. Pinterest now allows big retailers, including Zappos, Walmart, Disney, and Nestle, to use Pinterest’s real-time data to draw customers’ attention to the most popular “pinned” items on that retailer’s online store. When a customer checks out the retailer’s site, they will be greeted by lists of the most frequently and recently pinned items on that site. In an age where consumer demand is rapidly changing and evolving, online tools like these will be integral in helping retailers get a handle on just what it is consumers are excited about. In turn, the better a retailer knows what customers want, the better it can promote its items and encourage more online attention and sales.
Pinterest offers these new trending-product widgets though sets of application programming interfaces, or APIs. This new set of software commands is being offered free of charge and will soon be available to many more retailers in the upcoming months. While Pinterest representatives claim that they will not be able to receive any data from the new sites adding Pinterest software, this is still an important business decision for both retailers and Pinterest. While the retailer gets this software for free and can increase exposure to items on its website, Pinterest looks at this transaction as a way to garner more attention. While Pinterest’s head of partner marketing, Steve Patrizi says, “the primary intention is this benefits our partners, to help them better surface their content, and make it easier for people using Pinterest to discover great content,” he also believes this will be good exposure for Pinterest itself. He says, “For some users, this will be their introduction to what Pinterest does.”
Indeed, these new developments will not only increase consumer engagement on the Pinterest site, but they will also make online shopping on partner sites more interactive. Retailers adding this new tool are looking at this opportunity as a way to increase the amount of time consumers spend on their sites, and in turn, make the online shopping process full of new discoveries. As consumers discover the retailer’s most popular items, companies like Zappos hope that it will build customer loyalty and increase sales. As Will Young, director of Zappos Labs says, “Zappos has 150,000 things on our website. [This new Pinterest tool] is a great way to help people on our site find products they wouldn’t have otherwise found.” This will also make shopping a more social process, encouraging a community to form around these most popular items. With the rise in online retailing, consumers are more often looking for reviews and recommendations to inform themselves before making a purchase. Offering customers lists of the most popular items will only serve as positive “word of mouth” and stand as a testament to the quality of the retailer’s goods. Indeed, in the upcoming months, Pinterest plans to allow its partner sites to use Pinterest data to sort items by how recently they were pinned and to recommend similar or related items that were pinned.
For the past couple of years, Pinterest has allowed shoppers browsing on third-party sites to use “Pin It” buttons to pin items they liked without having to be on the Pinterest site. Now, some of the other partner sites looking to benefit from the new Pinterest APIs include AllRecipes, Better Homes and Gardens, Buzzfeed, ModCloth, Random House, and Whole Foods, to name a few. With the holidays right around the corner, this diverse array of partner sites equipped with Pinterest APIs should be able to help make a difficult shopping season much easier for customers.
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