Pinterest teamed with Stripe to allow consumers to buy the products that they see.
The company says that it will offer the ability to buy products from inside of pinned items,
Pinterest teams with Stripe
in what is its first foray into e-commerce on its service. The new product, named “buyable pins” allows sellers large and small to place a “Buy it” button on items that they post to the site.
Pinterest quickly caught on as a digital scrapbook where people could save things that drew their interest online. A user may come across an interesting pair of jeans on the web, for example, and “pin” a photo of those jeans to a Pinterest board. The idea was that users could collect items that they may find or buy later.
But there was no way to purchase items directly on Pinterest, so for many users, the idea of buying their saved items was largely aspirational. That changes with buyable pins, as Pinterest, which has raised more than $1.3 billion in venture capital, works to justify its valuation of $11 billion.
While the company does not disclose its number of users, estimates place its audience in the US at more than 75 million, according to the online analytics firm comScore. With buyable pins, Pinterest has teamed up with major retailers like Cole Haan, Ethan Allen, Kate Spade and Macy’s.
More than 2 million blue “Buy it” buttons will appear on products posted to Pinterest by these companies.
Payments made through the service will be powered by Stripe, an e-commerce startup, that focuses on small and midsize online businesses. Braintree, a payments processing company owned by PayPal, will also handle processing.
Other merchants will be able to sell items on Pinterest using Shopify, which does the heavy lifting of online commerce for smaller, independent businesses. The move is a major moneymaking opportunity for Pinterest and perhaps an obvious one for the company, which has been around for close to six years but has only recently pushed heavily into generating revenue.
The post Pinterest teams with Stripe appeared first on Payments Cards & Mobile.
