How the New Pinterest Now-Trending Tool is Helping E-Commerce

If you thought Pinterest was just for home decoration dream boards and cookie recipes, think again.  The social media site has a new tool to help out ecommerce sites while helping itself become an influential discovery tool on the web.

The Wall Street Journal reports that last Thursday, Pinterest began allowing big names such as Walmart and Zappos to use Pinterest data to display real-time “most loved/pinned” products on their ecommerce sites, just in time for the holidays.  The new feature is called the Now-Trending tool and even though it’s only available to those few partner sites right now, it’ll be available for all ecommerce sites very soon.

Pinterest’s Now-Trending Tool Looks Like This: 

The new trending widget uses Pinterest’s new and long-awaited API (Application Program Interface) that allows Pinterest to communicate with other applications, making data more streamlined.  As the API expands, it’ll collect more data and allow more companies to show products that are generating the most buzz all across the Internet.

In addition, Pinterest ­is adding a few filtering options that will let sites find and sort items by most-pinned, recently-pinned, and so on.  Again, while Pinterest is only allowing a few sites to enjoy this ecommerce goodness, it’ll soon be available to everyone, including a few other tools that the social platform is conjuring up to help ecommerce companies generate more sales.

The Pinterest Powerhouse

What’s important to note here is that Pinterest’s attempt at becoming a discovery powerhouse is something Facebook and Twitter haven’t found a way to do yet, especially in the world of ecommerce and online retail.  With this new tool, marketers and consumers can find out what’s in demand by online users in real-time, whether that’s recipes, articles, outfits, or the most popular products offered by retailers.  Content marketers, publishers, and bloggers can use the same data to pinpoint trending topics to create killer content as well.

Pinterest has been valued at $3.8 billion as of end of the last month (Oct 2013) and the site just raised $225 million this year, making it worth 15 times as much as the Washington Post and two times more than the New York Times (New York Magazine).  Currently, Pinterest accounts for 25% of retail referral traffic and Pinterest shoppers spend significantly (almost two times) more at checkout than shoppers on Facebook and Twitter.

What Does This Mean For You?

If you’re a retail site trying to figure out how you can increase your reach and influence, it means a lot.  With this new generating tool, customers who visit your site will be able to see what products are trending with Pinterest users.  And if we’ve learned anything about customer insight, we know that it’s gold.  Have you taken a look at Etsy and eBay’s new Pinterest curation of collections yet? Brilliant!

It’s time to start taking Pinterest seriously and not ride it off as just a social media fad.  With Pinterest’s ultimate goal of becoming the place to discover online content through creating helpful new tools, it’s well on its way to accomplishing that and much more.  And in its early, three-year-old infancy stage, to boot.

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