How Pinterest is closing the gap between content and commerce

Pinterest has been on a journey to make its content more “shoppable” for several years, its VP of product marketing and operations Julie Towns told Retail Brew at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this month. During a recent earnings call, the company even touted that the number of shoppable posts had jumped 50% in the second quarter.

But lately, the intersection of social media and e-commerce has gotten more crowded, with competitors such as TikTok going all in on turning its platform into a place to shop. Retail Brew asked Towns about the platform’s approach to e-commerce and how it plans to distinguish itself from rivals.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Does Pinterest see itself as an e-commerce platform?

We have 480 million monthly active users, and more than half of those tell us that they are here on Pinterest to shop. So I would say we are very much in the space of commerce. I think what makes Pinterest unique is that we want to first and foremost provide inspiration to pinners up front. So a lot of what we’re investing in now is making sure we have a diversified and large catalog of various products from all different retailers, and then secondly, making that process very seamless. So the strategy that we’ve taken is really partnering with retailers and helping pinners go from finding the product to the retailer. We want to make it easy for customers to shorten the path to purchase. We do not want to become a retailer ourselves, but we want to be able to help retailers gain a customer and not just a transaction.

How does Pinterest distinguish itself from other social media platforms that are currently embracing e-commerce such as TikTok?

I think Pinterest is unique in that we pride ourselves on being a positive corner of the internet. Gen Z makes up over 42% of our total audience base, and they tell us they’re on Pinterest because they’re looking for a positive, safe haven on the internet that is really about themselves and building your own self-identity.

Can you talk more about Gen Z’s influence on Pinterest’s approach to e-commerce?

I think Gen Z behaves differently than other generations on the platform. They’re our most engaged audience. They’re saving content at two times higher rates than other generations, and what we know is that pinners who save product pins to their boards have a seven times higher rate of conversion of actually purchasing those pins than any other type of action. So we’ve started to capitalize on that and are building new types of content on the platform. Just recently, we started to roll out a new experience called Collages, which is a type of content where pinners can kind of cut out images from different scenes and put them together into a vision board or manifestation board. Ideally, all of those products in a collage are shoppable.

Can you talk about where video fits into Pinterest’s e-commerce strategy?

Video is a huge part of our strategy. We started as an image-based platform, and we built first-of-its-kind technology for image recognition and image search. So the first thing that we are prioritizing is extending that unique technology to video, because video is a growing type of content on Pinterest, especially among Gen Z. We also know that video is a really strong media and that drives product purchases and conversions for advertisers. So we’re investing heavily and leaning into shoppable video, making all of the content within video identifiable and overlaying the products that are showing up in those videos.

Do you have any concerns that further commercializing Pinterest will alienate some users? How do you make sure that Pinterest retains its identity as a place for inspiration and creativity?

That’s a great question. I don’t have concerns and the reason is because we are very clear in our mission in two ways. One, we are here to be a positive place on the internet to drive diverse content. And what we’ve found is that relevancy really matters. If we maintain a high bar for relevancy in the content that we distribute both on the organic side as well as on the ad side—and that’s the challenge that we’re taking on right now—we know that the content that we’re sharing with pinners is additive to the experience. We are very closely monitoring all of the changes that we’re making to make sure it’s not only good or neutral to the user experience but positive and actually added it to user engagement.