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Pinterest now lets influencers make money off shoppable pins

Pinterest now lets influencers make money off shoppable pins

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Expect more encouragement to start shopping

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Pinterest

Pinterest is going after the influencer market. The platform announced its first set of tools today to let content creators earn money by promoting items from around the site.

The platform is adding support for affiliate links, letting creators get a cut of purchases they drive. It’s also adding product tagging to its story-like Idea Pins to drive sales from more places, and it’s adding a new “paid partnerships” label to support sponsorships within Idea Pins. The updates come a few months after the platform launched a $500,000 fund for BIPOC creators and sharpens the company’s focus on shopping as other platforms, like Instagram, start to take on shopping, too.

It’s all a way to promote shopping on the platform

Businesses can already upload “Product Pins” to Pinterest, which allow people to click through to find and then buy a product. Creators will now be able to browse these available product pins and integrate them into their Idea Pins, thereby making content with the product and making it easier for potential buyers to understand what they’re seeing and how to use it. The creators can also add their own affiliate links to these tags, allowing them to make money off any product sold. It’s all a way to promote shopping on the platform.

Availability varies, but the product tagging tool within Idea Pins will launch for all business accounts in the US and UK, with access rolling out over the coming months to international creators. The paid partnerships tool is now live for select creators in the US, UK, and Canada, along with 16 other countries.

The big idea here is clearly for Pinterest to make it easier for people on its platform to sell the things they’re already promoting and for users to more easily purchase whatever supplies they realize they need to make the various Pinterest project ideas they see come to life. Other platforms have also capitalized on shopping. Instagram, as likely the biggest example, created a full shopping tab in its app, allows for product tagging, and makes it easy for brands and creators to partner.