This post is one in a series about our new Pinterest Buyable Pins Extension for Magento that allows Magento site owners to list their products as Buyable Pins on Pinterest. We’ll be covering the value of Buyable Pins, more about how they work and how to take advantage of them to boost your sales. Today, however, we’re going to dive into how our extension works and what it does for you.
A Detailed Look at the Pinterest Buyable Pins Extension for Magento
In order for your product pins on Pinterest to become Buyable Pins, three things have to happen:
- Your business must meet the Program Acceptance Criteria and be approved by Pinterest for the Buyable Pins program.
- Your site must generate a product feed in a specific format that notifies Pinterest which of your products are eligible for purchase via the Buyable Pins program.
- Your site must implement a specific API that allows the Pinterest servers to create orders on your site for users of the Pinterest iPhone and iPad applications.
If steps 2 & 3 sound challenging – don’t worry, that’s the part that our extension handles for you!
A User’s Experience with a Buyable Pin
Users complete the process of finding and purchasing a product via a Buyable Pin completely in the Pinterest app on their iPhone or iPad. They browse Pinterest as they normally would, and when they find a product they want to purchase, they click the ‘Buy It’ button. They’re prompted for their address and payment information (and if they’ve completed a previous purchase, it’s already saved for them) and they then click the confirm button and the order is placed! Users can even complete their purchase via Apple Pay.
Users never leave the Pinterest app and never interact directly with the merchant’s website – there’s no distractions between the user and completing the purchase in literally two taps.
A Magento Merchant’s Experience with a Buyable Pin
I find two aspects of the Buyable Pins program really exciting from the merchant point of view:
1) There’s no transaction or subscription fees! Pinterest is providing this service for merchants free of charge, in hopes that it’ll increase your engagement with Pinterest through other things such as their Promoted Pins program. The only cost to activate Buyable Pins with your Magento store is purchasing our extension to setup the integration.
2) The merchant ‘owns’ the order.
When I say the merchant ‘owns’ the order I mean that unlike other third-party channels like eBay or Amazon, the transaction takes place using your existing payment account. The order appears like any other order in your Magento admin panel, and you have complete access to the customer’s email address and other information. Their credit card is charged by your existing payment gateway. This allows you to engage with the customer on a much deeper level to encourage them to then come back to your site and complete future purchases. For instance, if your Magento site already has MageMail installed, then customers ordering via Buyable Pins will also receive purchase anniversary emails and other triggered emails encouraging them to come to your site and place an order, delivering a much higher customer lifetime value than if they had ordered on a third-party channel like Amazon where Amazon ‘owns’ the order and the customer.
Our Buyable Pins Extension Handles the Integration For You
If you were using another eCommerce platform, you might have to handle developing your product feed and the REST API that Pinterest requires from scratch. This API is no simple thing – it requires implementing a very specific set of API endpoints that Pinterest is able to call to do everything from creating a cart to obtaining shipping quotes, manipulating coupons and discounts and completing the credit card transaction in a safe, secure, PCI-compliant manner. Implementing this from scratch could take hundreds of hours.
However, thanks to the great team at Magento, we here at Creatuity were able to team up with Pinterest and develop a reusable, simple integration so that all Magento merchants can easily integrate with Pinterest Buyable Pins program.
Our extension implements the product feed and the API required by Pinterest, so all you have to do is be approved for the Buyable Pins program and then purchase & install the extension.
I’m very proud of our team for building this ground-breaking integration to bring Pinterest’s Buyable Pins program to Magento. Throughout this process, we continually pushed the boundaries of what’s possible in Magento – for instance, we developed the first Apple Pay integration for Magento as part of this project. We’ll continue to post new articles over the next few weeks further explaining how the extension works, and how you can take advantage of it to greatly boost your holiday sales.
In the meantime, if you have any questions about the extension or if there’s anything you’d like to see us cover in a future article, please email us at pinterestbp@creatuity.com or reach us on Twitter at @Creatuity.
