Pinterest has been stepping up their game, and based on eCommerce research consumers can be influenced by “pins” they find on the popular social media website. Research shows Pinterest can drive as much traffic to an online store as some of the “old guard” such as Twitter. Even better, some studies have shown up to 10% higher conversion rates from traffic coming from Pinterest in comparison to traffic from other social media websites! It’s no wonder online stores have been taking notice what this social media website has been doing since their launch in March, 2010.
With over 70 million users and 2.5 billion pageviews, here are some things you should know about leveraging your Pinterest business account for your online 
store:
Pin It Buttons
If your products don’t have Pin It buttons on them, they should! This allows your website visitors to save an image on Pinterest, which can give you exposure to their friends. Any time you give people an easy way of sharing your message with their audience, it is a win-win!
Now-Trending Tool
This feature is only about a month old, and is a way for stores to show their most-pinned items. This has been rolled out to a few limited partners (e..g, Zappos) but Pinterest plans on adding more features and rolling it out to the general public once they work out the kinks. Stay Tuned!
Rich Pins
Released at the beginning of the summer, Rich Pins provide your shopping cart a way to feed information to your Pinterest account and “tag” your product posts with relevant information such as price and availability–and most importantly where people can buy it! You will probably require assistance from a web development company to prepare your website, but the approval process by Pinterest is fairly seamless once your website is ready. A recent study showed pins with prices generated 36% more Likes than those without.
Pinterest Analytics
You need a way to measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts, right? Back in the Spring of this year Pinterest released Web Analytics to help their users track things like how many people have pinned from your website, the number of views each pin has, etc. Of course you should always compare this data with your own analytics data from your website, but this was a welcome addition for online marketers. These metrics can help you test new images you put on your website, the popularity of certain products, and of course with eCommerce tracking in place on your website, which images are bringing you the most sales.
Taking advantage of Pinterest means you must have fabulous photos on your website that inspire people and make them want to share. Remember the majority of Pinterest users are women, so if your product lines are geared toward men perhaps Pinterest isn’t the right avenue for you. Top product categories that tend to do well on Pinterest are: Food and Drink, DIY and Crafts, Home Decor, Hair and Beauty, Women’s Fashion, Weddings, Kids, and Holidays/Events. Pin away!