Pinterest isn't quite done reinventing itself. What was once simply an online curation tool is now continuing to add features suited for an online shopping platform.
And with more than 100 million active users each month, Pinterest may be off to a good start when it comes to cornering its (largely female) audience as a target market for advertisers and vendors.
The app started off as a means to find inspiration — for just about anything under the sun — through its massive collection of images or "pins." Today, users are also able to shop for those sources of "pinspiration" on the very same platform, and this makes the app unique.
Going beyond simple curation, Pinterest has introduced new tools for pinners-turned-online shoppers.
The Pinterest Shop And Buyable Pins On The Web
Pinterest, which incorporated the "Buy It" function into its iOS and Android apps last year, has now made Buyable Pins available on the web as well to help streamline online shopping on both mobile and web platforms.
Back in 2015, a dedicated shopping section was also introduced, which showcased trends from companies.
Today, as Pinterest teams up with 20,000 vendors, big brands and budding names alike, the company is making sure shoppers won't get lost in a catalog of more than 10 million products. All thanks to a new section called the Pinterest Shop, users can "discover products you wouldn't have found otherwise."
To help shoppers find inspiration at the Pinterest Shop, guest editors and in-house editors will curate products from partner merchants to help serve as a shopping guide.
"Stop by every day to shop the latest fashion and home trends — like Nate Berkus’s ideas for summer entertaining," writes Tim Weingarten, a Pinterest product manager for Commerce.
New Shopping Bag
Once done scouring Pinterest's product collections, shoppers can make use of the new shopping bag feature, the platform's posh version of the shopping cart, for Android and the web (with an iOS version soon making its way).
"When you're ready to check out," Weingarten says, "everything you've added to your bag will be right there waiting for you."
Enhanced Visual Search
The most important in Pinterest's new suite of tools is the Visual Search. Shoppers who find items they like offline can soon search for similar items online using their own camera. Users simply have to take a picture of an item, zoom in on the object then crop the picture to start a visual search.
Pinterest will pull up recommendations from its catalog based on the user's image using what the platform calls "automatic object detection," which Samantha Murphy Kelly of Mashable says only takes about 4 seconds for the app to perform. The feature might not be live yet, but here's a sneak peek from the Pinterest team:
