E-commerce is becoming more important than ever as consumers shift their spending to online channels so Pinterest is encouraging brands to create a shopping experience that brings a sense of normalcy and delight to these challenging times.

Shoppers are turning to Pinterest as a key shopping destination and a place to get inspired and discover new ideas. In the past two weeks, there has been an increases in searches for topics like “home organisation” (43%), “spa day at home” (19%), “makeup tutorial for beginners” (180%), and “kid-friendly recipes” (64%), compared to the prior two weeks.

With this in mind, Pinterest is introducing new features to help retailers get discovered, and distribute their products in the spaces where users are most likely to shop, including the launch of the Verified Merchant Program, new conversion reporting opportunities, and updates to Catalogs and dynamic retargeting.

The Verified Merchant Program is for retailers that meet high quality customer service qualifications through manual review. These retailers will display a checkmark on their profile and become eligible for increased distribution within high-intent shopping experiences.

Retailers can also gain early access to organic and paid conversion insights including site visits, checkouts and sales over multiple attribution windows.

Pinterest has also updated its Catalogs by reducing the time from automatic feed ingestion to Product Pin creation, as well as new metrics, real-time feed ingestion, multi-feed support, user experience enhancements and feed ingestion scheduling.

With dynamic retargeting, advertisers in global markets can now reach Pinterest users who have previously engaged with their brand online or who have unpurchased items in their cart by retargeting exact or similar products they search and save on Pinterest.

With existing and new features, Pinterest recommends retailers take the following approaches to reach shoppers on Pinterest:

  1. Upload all your products to Catalogs to generate Product Pins, which display price, availability and product descriptions, plus link directly to your ecommerce page
  2. Use Shopping Ads to promote products to reach more Pinterest users and optimise performance once product groups are set up within Catalog
  3. Take advantage of dynamic retargeting to reach Pinterest users who previously visited your site, but didn’t purchase, as they continue to browse home feed