If you’re not a Pinner and unfamiliar with Pinterest, before buyable pins and Pinterest Shop, you could look at all the candles and scarves on Pinterest, but if you wanted to purchase any of them, you had to navigate to the seller’s site to make the purchase. Today’s Pinterest, however, allows you to automatically purchase anything with the blue Buy It button. The overwhelming success of the new button led to relationships and opportunities with major retailers such as Bloomingdale’s and IBM, who now provide products on Pinterest that you can buy while browsing through the boards of over 100 million users.
But because you still had to weed through millions of product pins to find the products with the blue button, Pinterest was unable to completely reach Pinners who log in and are ready to shop. The Pinterest Shop brings all the “trend collections” and buyable pins together — in somewhat of an online catalog, with all of your favorite things from your favorite retailers — to make shopping simpler. A Pinterest spokeswoman, Jamie Favazza, tells Wired, “As a catalogue of ideas, our mission isn’t to just show you those ideas, but to help you bring them to life.”
Although new and innovative for Pinterest, social media platforms are working on ways to make shopping within the platform more convenient. In the past, Facebook has experimented with its own buy buttons allowing merchants to sell their products directly from their pages. However, because the millions of Pinterest users visit and hang out on the platform specifically to look at and pin things they like, Pinterest could become a more successful platform for shopping.
The Pinterest Shop will be available over the next couple weeks and can be found on both Android and iPhone devices by tapping Shop in the app.
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