The world of e-commerce has been ever-changing since the dawn of the internet, and right now we’re stepping into uncharted territory. Purchasing is no longer limited to e-commerce sites. You can now purchase products directly from social platforms, like Facebook and Twitter. However, the real heavy hitter in this new age of e-commerce is Pinterest’s Buyable Pins, launched in June 2015.
Three months after launch, Michael Yamartino, Pinterest’s head of commerce, told Marketing Land about Buyable Pins in a telephone interview, “It’s not just people who were already going to buy this or who were already frequent shoppers at a store. So we are really helping businesses reach new customers. In a lot of cases, the data is showing that about 90 percent or more of the buyers are brand-new customers to the merchant.”
With 47.1 million users in the U.S. on Pinterest, this is not an audience to ignore.
What are Buyable Pins?
Buyable Pins are pins that allow users to purchase a product within the Pinterest platform. All they have to do is tap the blue buy it button at the top of the right hand corner and fill in their credit card information, and the product is purchased like any other e-commerce site.
People who wish to buy products using Buyable pins can pay using Apple Pay or a credit card.
How Do Businesses Get Buyable Pins?
Buyable pins are currently not available for every e-commerce platform. The two major e-commerce platforms Buyable Pins are available on are DemandWare and Shopify. Other retail businesses’ sites such as Nordstrom and Macy’s Inc., also have Buyable Pins.
Shopify outlines a step by step process on how to get Buyable Pins, and potential reasons why Shopify owners may get rejected for Buyable Pins.
If you are using DemandWare, it’s best to contact your customer success representative about how to get started with Buyable Pins.
If you don’t use any of those e-commerce platforms, then you can still apply to be on the waiting list for Buyable Pins.
Which Businesses Can Get Buyable Pins?
Only businesses within the U.S. that are selling physical goods in US dollars have access to Buyable Pins.
Who Can Purchase Products?
People in the U.S. have the right to purchase products through Buyable Pins. Once they have purchased a product and entered their credit card information, they don’t need to add it again the next time.
Are Buyable Pins Available on All Devices?
Buyable Pins are available on the Pinterest app for the iPhone and iPad, but Pinterest is working on bringing them to Android and to the desktop version of Pinterest.
How Much Does it Cost For Businesses to Use Buyable Pins?
The good news is that Pinterest is not taking any commissions nor does it charge a service fee for businesses that have Buyable Pins.
What if You Can’t Get Buyable Pins?
If you can’t get buyable pins then the next best thing to do is get rich pins for products.
Rich pins for products list what the product is, the price of the product, as well as whether a product is in stock.
Rich pins for products are technically available to anyone in the world as long as you follow the proper coding needed and get your rich pins validated.
Rich pins do not allow purchases to happen within the Pinterest app or website. Instead users must click on the rich pin and visit the e-commerce site in order to buy the product.
If you have rich pins enabled on your site and you lower the price by at least 10%, the pinners who saved that pin will be alerted of the price drop through both a Pinterest notification and an email – depending on their settings.
If you notice that there’s particular product that gets pinned a lot from your site, then dropping the price may be a great tactic to increase sales of that product temporarily.Pinterest is the only social platform I know that does e-mail marketing on behalf of businesses.
Upload Your Product Photos
The great thing about Pinterest is that pins that you upload can be linked back to any URL.
If you have a lot of photos of the same product that you can’t use on your website, you can upload them onto Pinterest and have all those photos linked back to your specific product URL.
One of my pet peeves is that Pinterest only allows you to upload one pin at a time, which can be excruciatingly time consuming if you have 40 different product pins you’re trying to upload.
If you are looking to upload a large number of pins at once, and then stagger them on different boards and times, I would suggest using Tailwind to save you a lot of time.
Make sure you don’t schedule all you product pins at the same time as this can annoy your loyal followers and they may unfollow you.
The great news is that once your site qualifies for rich pins for products, any pin that you upload and link to one of your product URL’s will also be a rich product pin.
Do you have any tips for promoting your products on Pinterest? Drop us a line in the comments and share your tip with others.
