Pinterest has a new way to entice users to come back and buy things: keeping tabs on the price.
That comes in the form today of a new tool that helps Pinterest users monitor price drops on products they’ve pinned. When users save pins, they’ll get a heads up when a price drops in the form of an in-app notification and an email. They can then jump straight to that pin and make the purchase.
The tool was driven by some user behavior the company expected to see in the shopping experience, Pinterest product marketing manager Sarah Shere said. Often when users are shopping, they are also waiting for the price to drop to the right point before finally making a purchase — which is something the company wanted to ensure it could enable as part of its shopping experience.
“I don’t think it’s a unique psychology to Pinterest, but we tried to build a shopping experience that worked for that customer experience — discovering a product, waiting for the right moment, and then completing the purchase in a seamless way,” said Shere. “In this case one of those right moments is waiting for the price to drop.”
Pinterest launched buyable pins earlier this year, which lets retailers add a “buy” button to pins and enables users to buy those products straight through Pinterest. After putting in a credit card and an address, a user can purchase products that have that buy button on them. Users can make purchases from anywhere on the app, like boards and through search.
In the end, this is likely about getting Pinterest users to come back and buy products on Pinterest. Though the company might not treat commerce as a strong monetization channel just yet alongside its advertising business, it helps get users to come back to Pinterest over and over again. That, in general makes the service more sticky — giving it an opportunity to better monetize its user base.
Still, commerce is becoming increasingly important to Pinterest, which is still rolling out new products that could one day drive additional revenue for Pinterest. According to an earlier TechCrunch report, Pinterest is forecast to make around $169 million in revenue this year.
