Pinterest publicly introduced a new Gifts feed on Wednesday that only displays “Product Pins” – pins that are enhanced with additional details, including pricing, availability and where the item can be purchased online. The announcement was made on Pinterest’s Business blog, aimed at advertisers, instead of on the company’s more widely read, consumer-facing main blog.
The company describes the Gifts feed as a “work-in-progress” section on the Pinterest website where only those items that are available for sale are listed. These products can also be filtered by price by clicking on buttons that range from one to four dollar signs ($ – $$$$), equating to products that range from less than $50, $25-$50, $50-$200, and over $200, respectively.
Product pins were first introduced in spring 2013 as one of many new pin types on the service, which also included other new things, like movie pins and recipe pins, for example. In order for retailers to take advantage of the new functionality, they have to first update their website with the appropriate metatags (described here on the Pinterest Developers website). Afterwards, Pinterest users encountering those products on the social service would be able to see the product’s price and inventory levels, and could even click through on the provided URL to make a purchase.
Product pins have been used for other Pinterest features, too, such as the company’s ability to track price changes for shoppers’ favorite products, and then alert consumers when the price drops.
Pinterest is currently curating the Pins feed, which means retailers can’t directly add their pins to this section – instead, they have to implement the rich pin functionality on their website in order to have their pins appear. Those merchants selling on larger marketplaces, like eBay or Etsy, won’t have to worry about this, however, as the integrations have already been done for them by the commerce platform provider.
Pinterest tells us that it decided to launch the new Gifts section after seeing success with a similar feed around the holidays. The feed actually went live a few weeks ago, but was only publicly announced to the Business blog readers this week.
The Gifts feed with the price selector feature is currently available only on desktop; it’s available also on mobile web, without the price selector.
The new section on Pinterest could later become more personalized, similar to the “Explore” section Pinterest recently launched, which is meant to highlight pins related to a user’s interests. Today, that interests homepage is just a mix of articles, how-to’s, photos, and products, while the Gifts feed is obviously just the latter. The Gifts section could also be another section on the site where Pinterest advertisers could pay to have their pins shown to end users, though given the “work-in-progress” label, it doesn’t appear there’s any sort of formal program around this at the time.