← Simple Pin Podcast: Simple ways to boost your business using Pinterest
Simple Pin Podcast: Simple ways to boost your business using Pinterest
Pinterest Amazon Storefront: The New Feature That Automates Your Affiliate Commissions
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Hey there and welcome back to another episode of the Simplepen podcast. Pinterest and Amazon just made something really easy for creators. If you have an Amazon Storefront or you've been thinking about building one and you're using Pinterest to drive traffic, this update is going to feel like a huge relief because one of the biggest friction points just got removed. No more copying and pasting individual affiliate links. Like every single time you take a product, Pinterest now connects directly, directly to your Amazon Storefront and it does the work for you. So I'm going to break down exactly what changed, what it means for your business and how to get it all set up. Okay, who this is for and who this is not for. This is for creators who already have an Amazon Associates or influencer storefront and produced product focused content. Say things you think people will love. Maybe brands running affiliate or influencer programs through Amazon and a lot of Pinterest management. People who need to understand what's changing for their clients. Okay, who this is not for anyone thinking this is about Amazon selling products directly through Pinterest ads or brands with Amazon brand store that is completely different. Unrelated. I'll touch on that a little bit in just a second. It's also not global yet, so it's just in North America and it's a creator monetization feature, not a retail feature. Okay, now that we're clear on that, how did we get here? In 2023, Amazon became Pinterest first third party ads partner. This is the moment Amazon started actually showing up as a paid ads inside of Pinterest. I see them all the time actually. Then in April, May 2026 they launched a beta group to test that I was a part of it. It was super cool. Not just the ads, but the Amazon Storefront connection. And you could link your storefront account in your settings and it made linking a ton easier and it was really fun to figure out how to do it, but it wasn't released widely. Then on June 10, 2026 Pinterest launched Amazon Storefront linking for all creators essentially. It went public. June 15th of 2026, Pinterest Creator Blog published the walkthrough of how to set this up. We're going to link that below in the description for you. Okay, so what's happening now? Kind of like the feature itself. So creators essentially connect their Amazon storefront inside their Pinterest account. So I won't do so much of walkthrough here just because people are are listening but also watching on YouTube if you go into settings and you go into linked accounts. You will see the ability to link to a storefront right there. Now, it's really important if you're listening and you are a brand store, this is not the same thing. So if you are a seller on Amazon, this is totally different. Amazon Storefront will be what you want to link. We also have a video about the five different ways that Amazon and Pinterest are connected because it can get pretty confusing. So I'm going to link that down below for you to watch. If you are a podcast listener, you're going to want to hop over to YouTube because that was a YouTube video only. But it's important that you understand all the different ways that Pinterest and Amazon are connected because frankly, it's a little bit confusing. Okay, now that you've linked your Amazon Storefront, the affiliate link is automatically applied whenever you tag an eligible Amazon product. No copy and paste, no manual affiliate ID entry. It's really slick and easy. So eligible creators get their Amazon storefront handle featured directly on their Pinterest profile as well. So it's not just per pin, it's also a profile feature. Amazon may boost linked content as an ad on Pinterest at no extra cost to the creator, which can be a real incentive that's worth flagging free reach for your connecting storefront. Win win. The feature is rolling out gradually to creators globally with eligible Pinterest business accounts. So this is not for everybody. Yet Pinterest confirmed storefront linking with other partners is coming soon. In fact, I believe I've seen Target pop up in there. So if you are a Target shopper, Target is linked for you. But that's how we saw Amazon start as well. Amazon was a store like customer feature. It would link between Pinterest and my Amazon account, which was super dangerous in buying things. Now it's Target. So my assumption is that Target will be their next affiliate partner. But I don't know that for sure. That's just my guess. So why is Pinterest doing this Pinterest pitch? It leans heavily on intent based user behavior. So what that means is more than 50% of Pinterest users come to the platform to shop and people search on Pinterest more than 80 billion times a month. VP Lauren Glaubach, I think I said her name right, framed it as Pinterest sitting closer to decision making than being further apart. So making sure they can reach audiences at the moment they are inspired in order to turn that into action instead of a usual habit on Pinterest, where they save a whole bunch of stuff and then they come back six months later. Now, that still happens on Pinterest, but it would be more so that they see something they can easily buy it, connect seamlessly. Pinterest to Amazon. Boom, boom. You have a purchase, right? There's also a competitive angle worth naming. Most Amazon affiliated creator activity has historically lived on just YouTube, just TikTok, just Instagram or Facebook. This is Pinterest trying to pull in that existing creator economy onto its platform by removing friction, not by inventing something new. So this is an important distinction and this is where a lot of secondary coverage kind of gets a little bit sloppy. There are two completely different things, both called Amazon Storefront, that we need to kind of clear up. Amazon Influencer Storefront is a customizable page members of the Amazon Influencer program can create to feature products that they recommend to their audience. I love these. I end up buying way more when people sometimes link to their storefront. Right. So this is what Pinterest is integrating with. There's also Amazon Brand Store, which is a free dedicated space where a brand can showcase its full product catalog. Sometimes I'll actually go directly to the product store because it ensures me as a customer, I'm actually buying from the brand because I know there's times where there's sketchy things on Amazon that might be fakes, might be something different. So I'll go to this. Correct. This requires a professional selling plan, a registered trademark and a brand registry enrollment. This has nothing to do what's happening in the Pinterest news. I just want to make sure that's clear. So if you have a brand store and you heard Pinterest now links Amazon storefronts, it's totally different. So I just want to make sure you know that it's differentiated. And this is for influencers and affiliates. There you go. Okay, so coverage so far on this has been pretty good. I've been a part of the community that Pinterest hosted for this, for the beta group. People are asking a lot of great questions. Pinterest is actually really helping a lot of that community with trending topics, what to pull in from Amazon to create. In fact, I did a really great video with another community that you can watch on YouTube. I'll link to that as well below low about how this whole thing can be leveraged in order for you to get more sales, affiliate sales from customers on Pinterest. I think there's definitely a way that you need to do this. This is not Just slap up a bunch of products. Collages are the way to go. I really think there's a lot of creativity. We have not hit a ceiling here. You can do a lot of creative things to try to increase your monetization opportunities. When it comes to leveraging Amazon on Pinterest, some analysts have said brands should treat this as a practical test, not a guaranteed growth driver. So there's no public performance data on this yet. We really don't know how it moves. Clicks, conversions and commissions. In fact, inside my SPM Insiders group, there's several people who are testing different things to see what actually generates sales. So just know that it is still a work in progress. But if you've been looking for another arm of monetization, maybe you've been doing a bunch of Amazon affiliates on TikTok or Instagram or Facebook and you want to try Pinterest, this is definitely the time to try. Just a reminder, we still have FTC disclosure rules that apply making sure that you disclose you are sharing an affiliate link. It's best to do that on the pin description and don't put that in your bio to be like, hey, guess what? I'm affiliate. I'm an affiliate partner with Amazon. No, each and every one hashtag affiliate will probably suffice. Bill Ready, the CEO of Pinterest, right around when they released this, had this to say about the connection. He said shopping is native to the Pinterest experience and that creators add incredible value by helping to curate that inspiration operation. Our new global integration with Amazon builds on this by letting creators link their storefronts directly to their profiles, removing the friction of manual affiliate links and giving users a direct path to buy. If you want to go deeper on how Amazon and Pinterest work together beyond the storefront, I did a whole breakdown on that. I'll link it again below and it's definitely worth watching before you start to set this up. We have set up the Amazon storefront connection here at simplepin. You can go to our profile pinterest.com simplepinmedia all one word and if you are optimizing for affiliate marketing on Amazon, this is a good natural next step. If you're totally new to this. Before you rebuild your whole Pinterest strategy around this Amazon update, make sure Amazon is actually the path you want to choose. Some of you should be doing digital products, some of you should be doing physical products on your own. Some site. That's what the free Pinterest profit plan sorts out for you in five days. Real timelines real next steps. No hype. The link is in the show Notes all right, we'd love to hear your experience with the Amazon storefront. If you've already connected your account. If you have already made sure that you are leveraging this, we'd love to hear your experience. 1. If you want to share that in a group with people who are already testing this, you can join SPM Insiders. We will link that below or you can email us helloimpleplepenmedia.com and since this is such a new feature we are very curious about how it is working in quote unquote real life if you will. So make sure that you let us know. We would love to hear from you. We always always read every single email. Again that's helpful below@simplepin media.com okay go ahead and watch this video about the five ways that Amazon and Pinterest are connected so you're familiar with that before you get started. Alrighty. Thanks so much for listening and watching.