Pinterest expands personalized shopping recommendations

Pinterest today introduced a series of new tools to help merchants sell their products, including Catalogs, which lets anyone upload and convert their entire product catalog into shoppable Pins. Previously this feature was only available to select brands working with Pinterest, head of shopping product Tim Weingarten told VentureBeat in an email.

A Related Products feature is being rolled out now and will appear under product Pins to showcase inventory uploaded by brands.

Personalized shopping recommendations were also expanded today to serve up results that resemble individual users’ saved pins — based on the available inventory from merchants with shoppable Pins. Personalized shopping recommendations will be visible on the home page of Pinterest users’ apps and in Style, Home, Beauty, and DIY boards.

Last fall, Pinterest reported that it had 250 million monthly active users.

Above: Personalized shopping recommendations

Image Credit: Pinterest

Pinterest Shopping Ads were also made generally available today for merchants in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland. Ads were previously only available to select brands, Weingarten said.

Pinterest has introduced a suite of features to bring brands to Pinterest users in recent years.

Lens Your Look, which lets you take a picture of an item of clothing and find similar options, was introduced in 2017, while Shop the Look was fully automated for the first time last month. Lens, Pinterest’s visual search engine, powers more than 600 million searches every month.

Last month, Pinterest confidentially filed for an initial public offering (IPO), and it is expected to seek a $12 billion valuation.