Pinterest expands social commerce features

Time flies and the holiday season is quickly approaching its festive highlight: Christmas! With Q4 and Christmas being the most important time for many brands, it is also the most important time for social media platforms. It is the time when they are rolling out new features or concepts and are helping brands to better reach their (pot.) customers.
Improving their own social commerce capabilities is a major point on every platform's agenda and Pinterest marked off some timely ToDos right before Christmas. 

Improving the Social Storefront
One the essential differentiators  between just window shopping and buying is inspiration. The ability to discover and experience products easily is key. Pinterest made some interesting changes and additions to enable exactly this.
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​Merchant Storefront Profile
An updated profile enables brands to transform their shop tab into a storefront with featured in-stock products organized by category, featured product groups and dynamically-created recommendations. 

Product Tagging
A feature we all know from Instagram is the ability of brands to tag their own products in scene images. Pinterest is now testing this as well to make it more seamless for shoppers to shop from this scene and make that inspiration a reality.

Product Catalog improvements
Product catalogues are quintessential for any brand or retailer with huge amounts of different products. On Pinterest it is now simpler to upload those catalogues as well as keep them up to date with scheduling mechanics. IKEA used this functionality recently to upload over 130.000 products.

Collections are becoming an ad format
With the aforementioned ability to upload huge amounts of products, Pinterest is combining this with its current collection feature transforming this into its own ad format. Brands can now select a main asset and a corresponding product group to create an inspiring, multi-image ad unit. Additionally, Pinterest is launching the option to use video as a hero in a Collections ad unit to further tell a brand story.

Conversion Analysis
Introducing a visualization tool a more granular look into conversion performance is now possible. Brand can see how customers are completing their path to purchase - all summarized in a familiar funnel.

None of those features are game-breaking for advertisers as most of them are already known from other social media platforms. However they further solidify Pinterest position as significant part of a brands own social storefront.

Stay cmmrcl.ly impactful!

Sources: https://newsroom.pinterest.com/en/post/pinterest-launches-new-commerce-tools-for-merchants-to-curate-feature-and-measure-their

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