When everyone seemed to have disregarded Pinterest as a social media platform, it made a strong product discovery/eCommerce push under the leadership of new CEO and former Google commerce chief Bill Ready.
In the wake of the COVID lockdowns, Pinterest saw a significant uptick in usage, but as stores reopened, its user base returned to its pre-COVID levels. Fortunately, it now appears to be regaining some of its footing.
If it manages to get out of this seemingly unending cycle of ups-and-downs, it will have a lot of room to grow as it continues its quest to becoming the social media ecommerce centre.
For an insight into Pinterest’s future, let’s take a look at the following:
Pinterest, like Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, is dabbling in live-stream shopping; if the format catches on, the company will likely prioritise its incorporation inside the app.
Since live shopping seems tailor-made for Pinterest, the company seems likely to add more live-stream display possibilities in 2023, including perhaps a full-screen live-screen shopping tab.
Pinterest is also expanding its augmented reality tools. More likely than not, Pinterest will provide new tools to assist businesses in more readily capturing things in 3D, to feed augmented reality product Pins.
Pinterest is already working on AR Try On capabilities for home decor items, as demonstrated here, and will eventually roll out an enhanced capture technique, via the Pinterest camera, to allow additional merchants to generate 3D depictions of their products (hopefully).
As challenging as DIY 3D capture is, if Pinterest can come up with a more stable, improved technique for things, this might be a significant move in the app’s direction towards product discovery trends.
With a former Google CEO at the helm, it’s safe to assume that discovery will continue to be a priority for Pinterest as the company pursues new chances to showcase the most relevant items through enhanced search tools and procedures.
We can anticipate Pinterest to continue refining and improving its procedures to help maximise product discovery, in accordance with personal usage habits and preferences, as it continues to make success in this area by adding in more personalised discovery features.
It’s likely that Pinterest will also implement more tools for comparing products to discover the best discounts in the app.
While Pinterest has had some success in its core markets, the company has much room for expansion in many others.
Reports have shown that North American users provide a disproportionately large share of Pinterest’s total revenue. While Pinterest is still expanding, it needs to concentrate on expanding its ad chances, such as making Pin advertisements available in all areas.
Accordingly, the platform will be putting more resources into expanding into overseas areas and adapting its advertising capabilities to meet demands in 2023.
Pinterest would need more products in line with its hopes for improved discovery. Thus, it will likely keep working to enhance its catalogue ingestion tools and encourage more sellers to make their wares available as Buyable Pins.
Pinterest has made big strides in this direction as well, but the simpler it is for stores to show off their products, the more will do so.
Jaw de Guzman is the content producer for Comms Room, a knowledge platform and website aimed at assisting the communications industry and its professionals.
