Pinterest announces new shopping features

Pinterest is rolling out Catalogues and Shopping Ads in France, Germany, Italy and Spain to select partners.

With Catalogues businesses can upload their full catalogue to the social network and turn their products into shoppable Product Pins, which can now become useful Pinterest ads. Pinterest is partnering on this with such retailers as Leroy Merlin, ManoMano and Maisons du Monde.

"Pinterest has already enabled us to inspire consumers across Europe to consider Leroy Merlin for home ideas,” says Tatiana Okutina, Head of Comms, Home Improvement Projects at Leroy Merlin.

“Because of the open mindset of the audience on Pinterest who are looking for ideas of what to try and buy next, we were eager to explore more shopping features to help customers take their home projects from inspiration to action. So far, Pinterest's shopping features have increased traffic to our site, leading to more engagement and potential purchases.”

Pinterest is also announcing Shop the Look ads in the US, a collections format for mobile. Companies can now have their Pins and products front and centre of their Pinterest profile, thanks to a new Business Profile feature. A dedicated Shop tab enables people to shop items directly from the profile and drive traffic to the retailer’s site. It is also possible to customise profile covers with video or images to more effectively highlight brands.

Last week, Pinterest launched shoppable Product Pins inside visual search results. These will appear when people use Lens to search within a Pin. With its visual search technology, Lens can now recognise more than 2.5 billion objects across home and fashion Pins. According to a study by CSpace, 80% of Pinners start with visual search when shopping vs. 58% of non-Pinners, and 61% of consumers use visual search to improve their experience while in-store browsing.