We all know that Pinterest marketing works well for bloggers and content creators, but what about eCommerce businesses? Discover if Pinterest is right for you as we listen in on a conversation between with Kate and Vivian Eccleston, our eCommerce specialist for Simple Pin Media.

Twice a month in the Simple Pin Collective we hold a coaching call so members can ask questions related to the topic of the month. This month’s topic was how to get people on Pinterest to convert into customers using all the shop integration features available on Pinterest.

Vivian is passionate about working with eCommerce clients. Earlier in the year, we asked her to research all aspects of Pinterest and eCommerce to help us figure out everything we need to know to help our clients here at Simple Pin.

I asked Vivian to join me in the Collective and share everything she has learned about eCommerce, product tagging, and the Verified Merchant Program. Today’s podcast is a recording of that conversation.

We’re going to review the current status of these new Pinterest features and then we’ll answer some of the questions posed by our Simple Pin Collective Members.

Pinterest for ECommerce

Product Tagging on Pinterest

There’s a lot of conversation and confusion around product tagging on regular pins and idea pins so let’s start there.

Vivian sees product tagging as a great feature for showcasing your products and creating a direct link to your product page, especially as we get close to the holidays. You do not have to have shop integration to tag products on regular pins. Anyone can tag products on regular pins.

Related: Holiday Selling on Pinterest

Vivian shared a great example with gift guides. She says you can create a pin about the gift guide and link it to your blog post. The cool thing is that you can tag up to eight products from your gift guide that will be featured right next to or right below that pin.

In her experience, there are some glitches associated with tagging digital products (they often don’t show up after you’ve tagged them). However, you can tag any of your physical products. You can also tag affiliate products.

Gift guides are not a novel concept for our Collective members. We even have videos on how to create them in the Collective Learning Library. However, we’ve never really been able to directly link to products on a pin like we can with product tagging.

So the great news is even if you don’t have a Shop tab on Pinterest, creators can still utilize this product tagging feature on regular pins!

In addition to tagging standard pins, you can also tag products within idea pins. Currently this feature is only available on iOS or Android devices.

It will be much easier to tag your idea pins if you have an integrated Shop tab. Product tagging in idea pins is still a bit glitchy, especially when it comes to tagging via a URL.