PINTEREST-social Star To Estimulate E Business

PINTEREST-social star to stimulate e-commerce

“The new tool for collecting and organizing the things you love”, this is how Pinterest defines itself. Pinterest is a social platform that allows you to organize and share everything you find interesting in the web. It was created by Ben Silbermann, in 2009 and released on May of 2010.

The Pinterest cycle is simple to understand and once you have signed for it, it becomes even easier. It has two main tools, firstly the pin, it can be a recipe, a piece of clothing, a quote, a movie, etc. and they are shown in your main site, and they are related to your interests (which are selected at the moment you create you account). Then we have the boards, where people organize and collect their pins. These boards are designed and structured by the user according to their specifications and needs. You can follow other people’s boards, or just some of their pins, according to what you want. In the main site you find everything related to your interests, and then you start pinning or liking other peoples pins, and then adding them to your boards or just looking at them.

Although the company has been growing through the years due to its success in social e-commerce, the biggest growth wasn’t shown until this year of 2013. The critics for its success were severe and a small percentage of them were positive. But, how can you criticize a company, which social commerce sales grow from 2% to 23% in 1 year? This is indeed something potential critics were not aware of.

Pinterest has become the social star to stimulate the e-commerce; it is now generating a total of 23% of the e-commerce sales in the social network. Even though the percentage is still lower than Facebook (28%) and almost the same as twitter (22%), it is still a high percentage, taking into account that the active users of Pinterest represent a 20% of Facebook users and less than a 50% of twitter users. This numbers radically changed from last years’, noticing that Pinterest just had 2% of e-commerce sales, relatively bellow Facebook, which had 55%.

The success of the company is due to its visual and product focus, which makes it a natural partner for e-commerce. Pinterest focuses more in product, than messaging and interacting, which differentiates it from potential companies such as Twitter and Facebook. Even though social e-commerce represents just a small percentage in sales, it definitely influences costumers’ decisions, as 74% of costumers rely on social media when buying a product.

Everyone wins with Pinterest in the e-commerce market. The retailers obtain valuable information about their top products, which can help them retain their costumers; Pinterest acquires fame and extends its actual base of 70 million users; and the e commerce clients obtain an estimated preference of products made by other users, which would definitely help them with big departmental stores such as Wal-Mart.

Although the success of the company seems to be growing faster than expected, they are still adding new tools to expand their e-commerce business. The most recent one that is gaining popularity among the retailers is the “now-trending” tool which, consists basically of allowing partners to use real-time Pinterest data to generate lists of the most-pinned items in their online stores. This new tool is not available to every retailer, but its planned to expand their availability so that other business can use this potential tool.

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