Pinterest adds three e-commerce platforms
Pinterest lends itself naturally to selling the products that its users share millions of times a day. Now it's making it easier than ever for brands to sell, and consumers to buy within the social platform.
The private company is adding three new e-commerce platforms, IBM Commerce, Magento and Bigcommerce. It's also adding some big new brands: Wayfair and Bloomingdale's, Demandware merchants DVF and Steven Alan, plus thousands of Shopify stores.
The social sharing platform is also announcing some growth stats. Since announcing "buyable pins" in June, it has thousands of merchants selling millions of products. The number of buyable pins has doubled to more than 60 million. And Pinterest says the buyable pins are performing well so far, a study of Shopify merchants pins showed twice as high conversion rates as other mobile Pins.
And the company cited research from Millward Brown, which showed just how important the platform is for driving purchases: 93 percent of Pinners plan purchases with the platform and 87 percent have purchased something because of Pinterest.
Pinterest's expansion of its embedded commerce comes after YouTube announced shopping ads last week and Twitter announced it's expanding its "buy now" button to any retailer, of any size, across the country.
With Facebook's brand pages, and Instagram's "buy" buttons, all the social giants are looking to make it easier for brands to get people to buy — removing that final layer of friction between seeing a product and clicking to purchase.