How to sell on Pinterest

Overview

Pinterest is the social of ideas, inspiration, and above all, product discovery. In this article, we will discuss how to sell on Pinterest and what are the best-embedded tool you can use to improve your reach, brand awareness, and, of course, increase your sales.

Keep reading to know more.

Can you sell on Pinterest

Pinterest is a popular visual search engine and social network used by millions of users to find and share images.

In a nutshell, Pinterest is the social of ideas, inspiration, and above all, product discovery.

Although Pinterest may not look like a sales platform or a social media that may attract potential buyers, it provides many functions and features that help sellers find potential customers and drive traffic to marketplaces and/or websites.

During the past 18 months, Pinterest has introduced several new features that make it easier for its 100 million monthly active users to find and compare products.

Here are some of the most curious and interesting features that make Pinterest a social suitable for selling:

1. From the first steps during the account setup and registration, Pinterest asks users to express their preferences and select their preferred topics. Once the algorithm understands the users’ tastes, it starts populating the dashboard with images of products the user may be interested in. Cool, isn’t it?
2. The visual research tool: a feature that allows users to find similar products to the ones they may already like. It eases the navigation and helps users find the best fit (keep reading to know more about it).
3. The “Shopping Spotlights” section: a board of products automatically generated by Pinterest on the basis of your and your customers’ saved pins.

Those features demonstrate why Pinterest is a very smart venue for anyone wishing to sell online, especially considering that is free.

So, if you’re still wondering if you can sell on Pinterest, the answer is: definitively yes!

Pros and cons of Pinterest

As mentioned above, Pinterest can be used by sellers to promote products and drive traffic to their shops. However, what are the pros and cons of the platform? What do you need to take into account while posting products on Pinterest?

Let’s dive into it!

Pinterest pros

• Discoverability: there are many reasons to use Pinterest with your business, and the main one is that using Pinterest can help you grow your audience and your online presence. Indeed, thanks to the shopping spotlight section, redirect links to your store, and Pinterest’s visual search users can easily find your products and decide to finalize purchases directly on your sales channels.
• Google ally: While content posted on social media like Facebook or Instagram is not featured in Google Search, Pinterest posts appear on the SERP, helping you to be found by people that is surfing outside the Pinterest platform.
• Free: Publishing on Pinterest is completely free, and besides advertising, all the posting features are free of charge.
• Band Awareness: By driving traffic from Pinterest to your website, you can get your brand known by an increasing number of users. That will improve your brand recognizability, enhancing trust and – consequently – the number of purchases. That’s why publishing on Pinterest is currently one of the best ways to boost sales on Etsy and on other marketplaces.
• Advertising: Even though the visual search is a powerful tool to increase the discoverability of your products, Pinterest also offers advertising that can help you to reach even more customers.
• Always up to date: Pinterest is constantly improving and adding more and more features for its users.

Pinterest cons

Along with the pros, of course, there are some cons to consider before putting effort and time into Pinterest:

• Competition: Your pins will be displayed amongst hundreds of posts. To catch the customer’s attention, you need to use aesthetic product images. And this brings up the second drawback…
• Content: You need to use great pictures to stand out from the Pinterest seller crowd! However, providing high-resolution and aesthetic product images is always a good idea if you want to enhance your chances of selling even on marketplaces.
• Seo savvy: To use Pinterest at its best, you need to know how to use the basics of SEO and keyword research. Each sale platform has its optimization rules. For instance, Etsy SEO best practices are more about content, while eBay SEO includes technical aspects.

Despite the few cons related to the use of Pinterest, sharing your product on it is a great opportunity to reach new people and sell more that you cannot miss.

How to use Pinterest for business

What is a Pinterest business account?

On Pinterest, it exists two types of accounts: personal and business. While personal accounts can only publish and save standard Pins, business accounts are provided with many functions, such as:

• Different Pin formats
• Adverting features
• Analytics and a business hub

Even if you are a seller, you can still post your products using a personal account. In any case, you are encouraged to open a business account, especially considering it is completely free and gives you access to features that can come in handy while running your business.

Create a Pinterest business account

To create a business account on Pinterest you need to:

1. Go to Pinterest
2. Choose your language and location, and enter your business name and your goal as a seller
3. Connect your other social platforms
4. Determine whether you want to run advertisements on Pinterest
5. Edit your profile
6. Claim your website analytics
7. Start creating and pinning.

How to list on Pinterest

Now that you know how to set up your Pinterest business account, you’re probably wondering: how can I list my products on Pinterest? And how those listings can help you drive sales to your business?

Let’s start with the basics:

• Pins: these are the Pinterest listing format. Each picture = 1 pin. Those are the things that you create, you can assign a name, description, link, and alt-texts to all of them. Read more about Pinterest SEO to help your pins rank the best.
• Boards. Those are like a big hub, a collection of your pins. You can create them by category, for example, if you sell jewelry, you can create boards named “rings” or “necklaces” and use them to collect and organize all your pins with the same topic.

Here is How it works:

• Import your multichannel products in Nembol
• Select them > Actions > Publish > Pinterest.
• And in a matter of seconds, your products will be bulk-listed on Pinterest with a redirect link to your source sale channel.

Visual search on Pinterest

How to image search on Pinterest

One of the most important features to mention is the Pinterest visual search. Using the visual search command in the right corner of the image (screenshot attached), a user can select an area of the picture and Pinterest will search for similar visual patterns within its database then provide the user with several options.

Here we applied it to the dress. You can see that the results have similar colors and fabric patterns. Pinterest also gives the option to filter the results by type of garment.

Let’s look at how we can apply it to a jacket:

• Pinterest recognizes that in our Pin is displayed a jacket, and it offers logical filter alternatives.
• Therefore, Pinterest users can access a whole set of related products archived in Pinterest’s database. You can see that many retailers and quite a few brands are already on Pinterest and their products are suggested to users doing a search.

• When a user taps “Visit”, the image, or the link beneath the image, he or she is automatically connected to the external website linked to the picture, meaning that ready-to-buy visitors are directed straight to the website or marketplace listing selling the product.

Bottom-line, visual research is a powerful tool that can boost your reach and can drive you to your store buyers with a high purchasing intention.

How to sell on Pinterest without a website

Sell with Easy Website

With Nembol, publishing on Pinterest won’t require any extra time if you already publish on a marketplace such as eBay or Amazon, or on your own website. Nembol will also automatically add a link to your website or marketplace listing (hence increasing your traffic and potentially your revenues) at zero extra marketing cost.

But if you selling omnichannel, how do you choose which channel to link to your products? Etsy? Shopify? Amazon? Which will be a win? Hard to say. But what if you could add all? With Easy Website you can do it!

Easy website is an automatically generated hub of all your products:

You just import your products from eBay, Etsy, Shopify, etc., and they will automatically appear on the Easy Website catalog as 1 listing. In this listing will appear all the redirect links of each platform.

Would you prefer to avoid expensive channel selling fees? No problem! With Easy Website you can!

• Create Pins with a redirect link to your Easy Website domain.
• Customers will be redirected to Easy Website.
• Chat with your customers via Telegram and Whatsapp
• Let your customer purchase your products from the channel with the cheapest channel fees or get paid through PayPal checkout to avoid channel selling fees! In this way, you’ll only pay for the PayPal transaction fees and any other channel additional costs!