Dive Brief:
- Pinterest’s more than 1 million Buyable Pins will now offer price-drop alerts via app and e-mail notifications.
- The feature was previously available on the Rich Product Pins the platform introduced in 2013 to turn pinners into shoppers.
- Pinterest reached 100 million users worldwide in 2015, and is projecting $169 million in revenues this year.
Dive Insight:
Pinterest is boosting the urgency of the offers made through its Buyable Pins with price-drop notifications. When a user of the online curation service pins a buyable item to his or (more likely) her board and the price changes, that user will be notified via e-mail, through the app or both, depending on their preferences.
Some 10,000 retailers including big names like Macy’s and Nordstrom sponsor Buyable Pins on Pinterest, allowing users to purchase quickly via a smartphone app. But in spite of Pinterest’s role as an aspirational shopping list, research from ChannelAdvisor says that users are less likely to convert on its platform than on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.
That’s an increasingly urgent problem for the platform as it struggles to monetize. Valued at $11 billion, Pinterest drew just $25 million in revenues in 2014 and is projecting to make $169 million this year, but says it will pull in $2.8 billion by 2018.
