Pinterest brings Shoppable Pins to visual searches for fashion, home products

Pinterest announced on Tuesday it has advanced its Lens capabilities, making it possible for the visual search tool to now identify more than 2.5 billion fashion and home products. With this latest advancement, the company is adding fashion and home related Shoppable Pins to visual search results.

“Now, when you use Lens within a fashion or home Pin to hone in on a specific product or object, you’ll see shoppable Product Pins (Pins with the current price and a direct link to checkout on the retailer’s site) along with visually similar ideas to try or buy,” write Pinterest on its newsroom blog.

Users will also now be able to save photos from their Lens searches and turn them into a Pin that they can save to a board. Pinterest will then use the “Lens’ed” photos to power future recommendations for the user.

Why we should care

Pinterest’s visual platform is a natural fit for home and fashion marketers, and the company’s push to wed its visual search technology with shoppable pins makes it even more so. By bringing shoppable pins to Lens search results and recommendations, the company is giving branded Pins more exposure and helping to shorten the customer journey by bridging the gap between product discovery and purchase.

“We see significant value for brands to tap into visual search on Pinterest as it will allow wider discovery by tastemakers and drive meaningful consumer engagements online and off,” said GroupM’s Global Head of Social Kieley Taylor.

According to a CSpace Visual Search survey, 80% of Pinterest users start with a visual search when shopping, and 85% of the survey respondents reported they put more importance on visuals versus text information. Forty-nine percent of the Pinterest users surveyed said they develop better relationships with brands via visual search. All more reason for brands to take advantage of Pinterest’s image-focused platform and visual search technology.

More on the news

• The latest updates to Pinterest’s camera Lens search technology were released on its Android app on Tuesday and will launch on iOS in the coming weeks.
• Earlier this year, Pinterest recruited Walmart’s former CTO Jeremy King to lead its engineering team, overseeing the team responsible for building out the platform’s visual search technology.
• Pinterest launched its “Complete the Look” visual search tool in June, a feature that recommends relevant home and fashion products to users based on the context of a scene within an image