You may have asked yourself these few questions: “How does Pinterest work for eCommerce sites?”, “Can I connect my Shopify store on Pinterest?”, and “How can I sell on Pinterest?”. Well, I am here to tell you (confidently) that Pinterest is a great place to promote products for eCommerce sites.
Let me first answer the most important question.
Can you sell on Pinterest?
First, I want you to understand what kind of audience you are working with on Pinterest.
Generally speaking, Pinterest users come to the platform to get inspired. They rarely go to Pinterest searching for something very specific like they would search on Google.
On Pinterest, users are just warming up to the idea or topic you might want to promote. So, what happens is that users come to Pinterest and look for various ideas they might like, and they often save these ideas to their boards.
What an eCommerce store wants is to get on the user’s board because when the user is ready to buy, he or she will go back to the ideas saved to that board, and will buy from there.
If we would base it on these stats, you will notice how strong the buyer intent is on Pinterest.
90% of weekly users are looking on Pinterest to make purchasing decisions. This may include immediate purchases and planning for later purchases.
55% of users claim that they log in to Pinterest specifically to find products. That’s more than half of all the user base.
Lastly, 50% of Pinterest users say that they buy something after seeing a Promoted pin – meaning, a Pinterest ad.
So, based on these factors, Pinterest is about 4 times more effective at generating sales than other social media platforms.
Pinterest versus other social marketing platforms
If you have been in eCommerce or any dropshipping business for a while now, you probably know that most of the marketers would recommend Facebook Ads. But the hard part of Facebook Ads nowadays is that there is too much competition there. Thus, the budget for Facebook Ads has become quite expensive especially for beginners in the industry.
And if we compare Pinterest and Instagram, just the fact that every pinned image on Pinterest is clickable and can be linked to your store or product page makes Pinterest so much more powerful as a traffic source compared to Instagram wherein you can have maximum one link to the store in your bio and that’s it.
Another reason why you should be on Pinterest is because of the half-life of a pin. It is so much longer than an average post duration on other social media platforms like Instagram or Twitter. For example, if you get traffic from your post on these platforms, it will last for a few hours or perhaps a maximum of one day.
On the other hand, your pins on Pinterest can bring you traffic for many months, and for some pins, even years. This especially applies to seasonal products because Pinterest tends to revive old viral pins every year when the season comes. I’ve seen this a lot with my Halloween and Thanksgiving pins. You can see on this screenshot that I’m getting traffic from the same post. This means that the same pins are getting viral year after year at the same time.
The best-selling niches on Pinterest
Now, how do you know if your product will be easy to sell on Pinterest?
It is known that about 80% of all Pinterest users are females, so keep that in mind. But at the same time, the recent stats showed that in the last four or five years, more men are joining Pinterest so the demographic on this platform is changing slowly but steadily.
Additionally, these recent stats show that:
- 70% of Pinterest users are actually Females.
- 34% of Users aged 18-29 in the US use Pinterest.
- 42% of US women adults use Pinterest.
- 84% of Pinners use Pinterest to decide what to buy.
- Millennials use Pinterest as much as Instagram.
Some of the niches which have the largest audience on Pinterest based on the numbers of the followers for each topic are:
- Home decor
- Fashion
- Health/weight loss also
- Anything holiday-related like
- Christmas gift ideas
- Mother’s Day gift ideas
- Halloween ideas,
- and more.
These topics work great on Pinterest because people like to use this platform for planning their holiday spending in advance.
If you decide to try Pinterest traffic for your store, I don’t recommend starting it if you don’t have the time to invest in learning about the Pinterest platform. Pins on Pinterest can bring you traffic for months or even years! But in order for them to work this way, you need to have a proven strategy and you have to use Pinterest SEO (search engine optimization) to rank your pins high in search results so that your pins will be shown to a targeted audience of people who are actually searching for the products you are selling.
You can dive deep into all of this in my Pinterest SEO Traffic Course.
How do I claim Pinterest on Shopify?
Yes, you can and should verify your Shopify store on Pinterest. You should also know that the Shopify-Pinterest integration is really easy because both Shopify and Pinterest apparently work together to make this integration seamless on the user side.
To claim your Shopify website on Pinterest, you will just need to follow this simple instruction provided by Shopify’s official site which helps you verify your store on any third-party services including Pinterest and Google Webmaster Tools.
Here is a simple walkthrough using my Pinterest account.
First, you will have to go back to the Settings page and head on to the Claim tab. From here, you can fill in your domain name and click Claim.
From there, you need to select the Add HTML tag option. It will show you a meta tag that you need to paste into your HEAD section of the site.
Going back to the instruction on Shopify Help Center, the first step is for you to go to the Shopify admin page. From there you go to the online store and then choose Themes. In there you will find the theme you want to edit, and then click Actions and choose Edit code.
And then in the layout section, you will click theme.liquid to open the file in the online code editor and then you just need to copy the meta tag that was provided by Pinterest and paste it on a blank line directly below the opening HEAD tag.
Make sure you don’t delete anything because if you save these changes with the things that you erased accidentally, it will be really hard to fix it. Your store should be verified within 24 hours by Pinterest – probably even faster.
How do I use Pinterest with Shopify?
To effectively utilize the marketing power of Pinterest to your Shopify sales, here are a few tips and recommendations that you can use to drive traffic from Pinterest to your Shopify account or any eCommerce sites.
1. Create Pinterest-optimized images
The first tip is to make sure the images you save from your shop are vertical and visually pleasing. If you simply save any small or horizontal product images from your shop and hope the traffic will come from Pinterest, it will not work for you.
Every platform has its rules and its own recommended formats for content. On Pinterest, your images have to be between 2:3 and 1:2 image ratio, so these would look like ‘tall pins’.
Another tip to creating Pinterest-optimized images is to use lifestyle product images instead of a simple white background.
The worst product pin is your typical Amazon-type of square image on a white background. Those images look too generic and too commercial. They have very low chances of getting viral on Pinterest. And because they are not vertical pins, they don’t take that much space in the feed and don’t attract much attention. Furthermore, according to the official Pinterest’s stats, lifestyle photos convert 170% better than product images on a white background.
Here is another pin example:
This pin is a lot better: it’s a tall image that shows the product gives an attractive text overlay and explains to the users what they should expect on the page after they do a click – that they will find watches for men under $200.
2. Create multiple pins (from essentially the same product) with different similar keywords
I would recommend creating multiple pins for each landing page on your site or each product page. This means you would create between 5 or even 10 pins that lead back to the same product page. Remember that consistently creating more fresh and original content is what the Pinterest algorithm wants.
Every image you create is a new piece of content for Pinterest, even if it leads to the same product page. So it’s always worth creating new pins for your pages.
Let’s say you are selling house cleaning supplies. What could be the keywords or topics you could use as a text overlay and also in your pin titles and descriptions to target a broad audience on Pinterest? To target people who are open to different options but don’t know yet the exact product they need, you need to show them what problems they can solve and mention the solutions.
Let’s take a vacuum cleaner for example. You could simply write on your pin “Dyson – V8 Animal Cord-Free Stick Vacuum – Iron”. This is the real name of a product I found on Best Buy.
Do you think anyone will click, share, or save a pin that has this as a text overlay? I doubt it. Now let me show you what you could do instead.
Your text overlay could be: “The Best Vacuum For Pet Owners”, or if you have a range of cleaning products for pet owners, you could make a pin like this one:
3. Create pins for sections (or categories)
Most of the eCommerce platforms are built in a way that your products are grouped in categories. And those category pages might actually be the best pages you can link to from Pinterest. With that said, this pin with 10 cleaning products should be linked to a category or section on your site.
Like I said, Pinterest users are open to multiple options or solutions for their problems. Another reason why linking to categories is beneficial is because pins on Pinterest stay forever. However, many eCommerce sites simply can’t have all the products to be available in stock forever. If you are still in doubts about which platform to choose for your online store, check here the Best eCommerce Platforms Reviewed all in one place.
So what happens then? This may result in the user going to an empty product page.
I’m not saying that you shouldn’t create any pins linked to specific products. I am saying that when you do so, don’t forget that when the product is out of stock, you should make a redirect of that page to the category so that people can find similar items in your store.
Through this, you are giving your users multiple options and ideas to choose from. They could even save multiple images from your page to their relevant boards this way which can also help your pin’s virality.
4. Collage pin image that shows multiple products
People on Pinterest like collages since it shows all the ideas and options in one viewing. Because of this, pins linked to so-called roundup posts or listicles do particularly great on Pinterest.
The main reason for this is the user intent on Pinterest. Users are in discovery mode and they are open to many options. So they actually prefer pins which have a text overlay such as “10 Best this”, and “15 Mind-Blowing that”.
It’s really very easy to create collage pins even if you are not good at graphic design. My Pinterest SEO course also gives you a detailed lesson showing how to use Canva’s free online tools to create pins.
5. Create Pinterest Boards for an eCommerce website
I also heard a lot of times from eCommerce site owners that they have a hard time understanding how to create boards for their Pinterest account. They feel like they don’t have enough content compared to bloggers, and don’t know where to start from when thinking about board titles. So, I’d like to clarify this.
First, you need to look at your product categories or sections in your store. With that, you could create at least one board for each category. But that would not be enough.
You need to have at least 5 boards for each category of your products so that each product or pin can be saved to 5 boards.
When you think about board titles, go from narrow to broad ideas.
If you sell leather bags for women designed in vintage style, the first board title could be very specific and then the other boards would be broad:
- Leather bags for women
- Vintage Accessories
- Handbags for Women
- Accessories for Girls
- Vintage Style
I would also recommend creating one board with your store’s brand in the title, and basically recreating your entire shop. If you have very different types of products, you could separate them on the board using board sections.
6. Using a Blog to Boost Traffic to eCommerce
If you are doing everything that I teach you in terms of Pinterest SEO and also following all the previous tips mentioned, but you are willing to go the extra mile to get even more traffic to your products, you could attach to your eComm store a simple blog.
This means that you are going to drive traffic to your blog. If you are on Shopify, you can actually create a blog right on the same domain as your store because Shopify has the blogging functionality as well.
But why would you even want to create a blog? It’s extra work for you so what are the benefits?
The first benefit is that you will have the best of both: product pins linked directly to your products, and blog posts and roundups of your products.
By roundups, I mean grouping your products based on a common theme or keyword and targeting this keyword in the title of your roundup post. Inside the post, you don’t need to write long texts—just the names of your products, images, and links to product pages.
This is similar to what I mentioned earlier when I talked about pins linked to categories. The difference is that in the case of blog posts, you’ll need to manually put a list of products and add links to each product.
So you can literally create the same pin with “10 Best Hats for Women” or “15 Home Décor Gifts” and link them to two different pages on your site. One will be your category page, and another will be a blog post page with a list of products form your store.
Take a look at this post to see how little text you need to make a collection like this. In this particular post, they made a collection of printables from various sources. In your case, you would just need to make a roundup with your own products and give links to each of them inside the post.
And there you have it! I hope the information I provided through this post will help you successfully integrate your Shopify and Pinterest account as well as master the Pinterest marketing strategies for your Shopify sales channel.
Here’s another tip for you: If you struggle to understand the basics of search engine optimization for Google, check this free training by Mike Pearson who has his Google SEO figured out and making over $10,000/mo with each of the two niche blogs he runs.
If you found this post useful, you might want to save THIS PIN below to your Pinterest Marketing board to check the post later when new updates are announced.
How to use Shopify + Pinterest Integration? Selling on Pinterest | Pinterest for Ecommerce (2023)
Instructions
- Can you sell on Pinterest?
- Pinterest versus other social marketing platforms
- The best-selling niches on Pinterest
- How do I claim Pinterest on Shopify?
I’m Anastasia and I’m a full-time blogger, online entrepreneur, and Pinterest marketing strategist. I help digital entrepreneurs and bloggers drive targeted traffic from Pinterest either through my online courses or through Pinterest consultancy.
