At an event at Pinterest headquarters in San Fransisco, CEO Ben Silbermann said that the blue buy buttons would soon let people shop at Pinterest.
Acknowledging people’s long desired will to buy clothing, crafts, home decor and recipe, he added “Pinners have been super, super clear about what they want next. People want to buy things on Pinterest.” This move steers the five year old company into the flourishing sphere of e-commerce.
The new product called Buyable Pins will first launch on Apple’s iOS devices in June, with the other platforms becoming compatible in “the coming months.” Users can shop by clicking on the Buyable Pins to explore details of price, color and quantity. Pinterest has partnered with a host of retail companies like Macy’s , Bloomingdale’s, Nordstrom and Kate Spade as well as with Apple, Braintree and Stripe.
However, Pinterest is not charging any fee to sell or buy on the site. Thus, it still remains unclear as to how it aims to mint money from e-business on its turf. For a company valued by investors at whopping $11 billion, the initiative is just one of the ways through which it seeks to monetize the platform in future.
The social networking site has been working to boost its advertising revenue for some time now. Earlier this month, it released an API aimed at developers interested in wrangling the data produced by the 50 billion-plus pins on the site to build apps. It’s also announced a collaboration with Apple Inc. to make discovering new apps easier and opened up its Promoted Pins tool up to advertisers, a move that the company says expanded its customer blanket by as much as 30 percent on average.
