Pinterest adds new ecommerce layer with personalized ‘shopping hub’ atop user feed

Pinterest continues to push ecommerce initiatives, introducing a personalized “shopping hub” last week that displays at the top of users’ feeds with product recommendations pulled from retailers’ organic Product Pins and Catalog feeds.

According to a Pinterest spokesperson, retailers can upload Pins via Catalogs and their products will be distributed across Pinterest’s shopping surfaces which include this new “shopping hub” feature, as well as other recommendation spaces and shopping feeds.

Pinterest also rolled out an updated shopping section that will display below Product Pins, highlighting Catalog content from the respective brand. “Making it easy to browse into the catalogs of brands of all sizes, like Target, Birdies Slippers, Joybird, The Tie Bar and Parachute,” Pinterest wrote on its business blog.

Why we should care

Pinterest is continuing to build out ecommerce features for its discovery platform to connect users to more branded product recommendations. This personalized “shopping hub” gives retailers the opportunity to expand their reach on the platform outside of ad campaigns.

Pinterest’s customized recommendations should give brands more exposure and more opportunities to move users through the customer journey, from discovery to purchase.

“We’ve found that people increasingly use Pinterest to search for specific types of products and vignettes, and Pinterest’s growing suite of Shopping tools helps us meet that customer demand, providing those shoppers with relevant options from Parachute,” said Parachute CEO Ariel Kaye.

More on the news

• Pinterest said its rolling out the new ecommerce features across U.S. brands for now, with global to come.
• Last week, the company announced its second earnings report since going public in April, with revenue up 62% and 300 million active monthly users.
• Earlier this year, Pinterest recruited Jeremy King, Walmart’s former CTO, to lead its engineering team.