Pinterest Takes E-Commerce By Storms: 10% Of Social E-commerce Visits [Infographic]

Pinterest the fastest site ever to gain 10 million users, taken the social platform by storms. while, Brands are utilizing Pinterest for e-commerce, With the holidays right around the corner. It’s time for brands to start using this powerful platform to drive sales. RichRelvance’s analysis of 490 million shopping sessions, which took place in 2012 and 2011 during a ten-day period beginning on Thanksgiving day.

As per the analysis 25,000 of their stores were utilized, to observe from where the referral traffic was coming from. The amazing factor was, visitors from Pinterest  are 10% more likely to make a purchase over other major social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Also, the orders tend to be higher, nearly two fold in fact than Facebook referral orders.

Also, this holiday shopping traffic from Pinterest increased almost double, this year. According to the analysis, Facebook still dominates social e-commerce referrals, but its share dropped by 5% while Twitter isn’t even counted a player in this  race, showing negligible 1% of traffic.

The traffic was noted 43% up, on a week after Thanksgiving day (2012), compared to same week of last year. One of every five shopping sessions began with a search engine this year, up from 14%  in 2011. Its worth to note that share of mobiles and tablets have also almost doubled this year by 15% compared to previous year (2011), whereas mobile traffic on Thanksgiving day peaked to 19 % of overall traffic. While Pinterest has the power to drive high-value referral traffic, it’s crucial to note that, Pinterest is about customer engagement.

Hopefully, the purchase ability in Pinterest more than any other social platform may be because of the reason that brands can successfully converse with pinners. There are several ways brands can converse with their customers in Pinterest, leaving comments on other user’s pins, liking other user’s pins, when appropriate, using the mention feature to mention other Pinterest users in comments (e.g., “Hi @daze, thanks for pinning!”), can follow other users or brands that pin items in a similar product category.

Also, Pinterest focuses on sharing images, it is surprising that engagement is lower and perhaps, users browse more products and look for more images to share.

This doesn’t surprise me and I think we’ll be seeing more focused social media sites in the coming years.

Actual engagement or conversation on Pinterest is minimal, but the level of sharing pics/pins is high because this is made easy to work with. Those products and services which lend themselves well to good imagery are likely to do well.