SAN FRANCISCO — In June, Pinterest rolled out 30 million Buyable Pins. Today, the mobile-only option expands with new merchants and platforms, doubling the number of Buyable Pins to 60 million.
Buyable Pins allow Pinterest users to buy directly in a Pin, without being redirected to a retailer’s site. (Pinterest saves payment information after the first purchase is made.) The first retailers to offer Buyable Pins included Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom and Macy’s, in addition to merchants that use platforms Shopify and Demandware.
Pinterest will today add e-commerce platforms Bigcommerce, Magento and IBM Commerce to the mix. This means that the wide range of merchants that use those services, from large companies to smaller boutiques, can enable Buyable Pins. Additionally, merchants Wayfair and Bloomingdale’s, Demandware merchants Diane von Furstenberg and Steven Alan, and thousands of new Shopify stores will now offer Buyable Pins.
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According to Pinterest head of commerce Michael Yamartino, these new platforms will open up Buyable Pins to a full range of retailers, rather than just big stores.
So far, Buyable Pins seem to pay off; a study of Shopify merchants using Buyable Pins found that conversion rates were two times higher than other mobile Pins. Yamartino also said Buyable Pins have helped merchants not only sell to existing customers, but have enabled them to reach new customers. According to Pinterest, Brooklyn-based shop Madesmith found that Buyable Pins made up about 7 percent of all sales, and all of those sales were from new customers.
Browsing and shopping on a smartphone or tablet, whether it’s using a mobile browser, a retailer’s app or an app like Pinterest, is on the rise. According to recent research from Forrester, mobile commerce is expected to grow from $115 billion to $252 billion in the next five years. The research also found that 85 percent of time spent on phones is in apps, but the majority of time was spent in five apps, so researchers recommended that retailers engage the customers where they are — including, for example, a retail aggregator.
Social commerce has been coming to popular apps in the past few months. In June, Facebook began testing a “buy” button with Shopify merchants, and Instagram offered a “shop now” button to advertisers. Twitter debuted a “buy” button in September with Burberry, before recently expanding to Demandware, Bigcommerce and Shopify merchants.
And Google, after creating “Purchases on Google” directly from mobile search ads in July, just expanded the option to buy from YouTube videos.
For now, Buyable Pins are free for the merchant and for the consumer, and Pinterest does not take a cut from the merchants. In the future, according to a Pinterest spokesperson, Pinterest will enable merchants to pay to promote their Buyable Pins through advertising.