Tips For Using The Pinterest Channel With Your Shopify Store

One of the many things I love about Shopify are all the sales channels that are available (at no cost) to store owners. For example, a Facebook Shop, Buyable Pins on Pinterest, and Product Tags on Instagram, just to name a few.

In this article, let’s talk about Pinterest.

Once you launch your Shopify website and are ready for sales [wink wink], you need to add the Pinterest Channel right away!

Did You Know? Pinterest currently has over 175 million monthly active users. And, there are 2 million people who save shopping pins to boards on a daily basis. That’s a lot of people to market your shop to!

When you add the Pinterest Channel, Shopify automatically sends all of your eligible products to your linked Pinterest account as Buyable Pins. This is HUGE!

Huge, because Buyable Pins on Pinterest are reserved for only a handful of big-name merchants and ecommerce platforms – Shopify being one of them. For example, if you have an Etsy shop, not even Etsy can offer Buyable Pins to their customers. This puts your Shopify website at a HUGE advantage!!!

With Buyable Pins, people who stumble upon these pins on Pinterest can make a decision right then and there to purchase that item. When they click on the pin, they can click the Add to Bag button and complete their purchase with you – how cool is that?!?!

Let’s look at some things you need to know, along with some tips to help you make the most of your Buyable Pins and the Pinterest Channel.

The Hidden Board

A little over a year ago, Pinterest used to display an automatic “shop” board in your Pinterest account where all of your products were pinned to automatically from Shopify. This was a public board that anyone could see when they went to your Pinterest profile. This public board was really nice because it was automatically populated with your products.

Sadly, Pinterest did away with that automatic public board about a year ago (I think it was a bad move on their part). Today, that board is still there, but it is a hidden board. If someone were to go to your Pinterest Profile, they would not see it. You can view your hidden board at https://www.pinterest.com/username/_products/ (use your Pinterest account name in place of username in this example).

Even though this board is hidden, your Buyable Pins are there on Pinterest – they just aren’t pinned to any public board by default. That’s where you come in.

Make Your Buyable Pins Visible

Even though your Buyable Pins are there on Pinterest – sprinkled about the Pinterestverse – you’re going to want to show them off and pin them to a board (or boards) within your Pinterest profile.

I strongly recommend you create what I call a “shop board”.

Create a Shop Board:

1. Create a board called “Shop YourShopName” (again, substituting your shop name in place of YourShopName) within your Pinterest profile.
   For example, I have a board called “Shop ThirdShift Vintage” (you can see it by clicking that link).
2. Make sure your shop board is the FIRST board within your Pinterest profile.
   I also recommend you write a really good, keyword-rich description for this new shop board.
3. Go to your hidden board (see link above) and then REPIN the items from that board onto your shop board.
   Make sure to have great descriptions for the pins, and include relevant #hashtags. 

TIP: When you are repinning products from the hidden board onto your shop board, keep in mind that if the board is visible to the public and you are repinning dozens and dozens of pins at a time, you are flooding the activity feed of the people who follow you. To keep that from happening, you could either just repin a dozen products at a time, OR, you could make your shop board a “secret board” until you have all your products pinned to it. Once you are done pinning (for the time) to that board, make it public. From that point on, when you add new products to your shop, you can go to your hidden board and repin those items to your shop board – but it won’t be all at once and your followers won’t be flooded with too many pins at a time.

More Information

If you need help on how to add the Pinterest Channel to your Shopify store, click Pinterest Sales Channel Help Page.

For more information about Buyable Pins, click Buyable Pins and Shopify.

Here are some additional tips for using the Pinterest Channel:

• Once you have all your current products pinned to your new “Shop [your shop name]” board, when you add new products to your shop, I recommend you pin them at that time right from your Shopify store. This gets them pinned to Pinterest immediately. Otherwise, it takes up to 5 days for Pinterest to populate your hidden products board. Make it a habit to pin new items as soon as you add them to your store.
• In addition to pinning your products to the board “Shop [your shop name]”, I also recommend you pin items to other boards where they fit. For example, after I pin a typewriter to my “Shop” board, I then pin that typewriter to my Vintage Home Office board. This gets those items even more exposure, and it takes just mere seconds to do.
• Make sure to read the articles I linked to in this post (see above) for tips on how to get your pinned products noticed more on Pinterest – by using good product names, descriptions, etc.

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