← Simple Pin Podcast: Simple ways to boost your business using Pinterest
Simple Pin Podcast: Simple ways to boost your business using Pinterest
The Latest Shop Features On Pinterest
00:21:40
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Hey there and welcome back to another episode of the Simple Pen podcast. I am your host, Kate All. If you are watching this on YouTube, what you'll notice is that there's quite a bit of sun coming in today, but it's also freezing outside. But I am welcoming the new fall and all that that means. And one of the things that I feel like fall requires me to do is kind of revisit some things, do some checkpoints, kind of get back into the weeds of some things that we haven't talked about for a while. And one of those things is the shop features on Pinterest. The reason we wanted to revisit this is because it was a big topic at Pinterest Presents 2025. We did a recap on that a few episodes back, so you can go listen to that. But it really emphasized this importance of shopping on Pinterest and making that a really simple, seamless type of process for those who want to buy. Also, there was a lot of emphasis on this idea of it's different here. And we're not necessarily text based in our search, but we're kind of the place where if you're looking for it, you'll know it when you see it. And so in order to make sure that you as an E commerce seller, have all of your connections set up appropriately in order to be a part of that search, in order to get in front of new people shopping for your product that might not have even known that they needed it. So we've done a lot of episodes here in the past, all about the Verified Merchant program, the Shop tab, the going away of the Shop tab. And so I wanted to do kind of a what's the latest in 2025? Is there anything new when it comes to getting your catalog set up? Are there any sets of confusion that people have? In fact, part of the educator program that I am doing with Pinterest, I am a verified educator with Pinterest, which is super cool. But I was had the opportunity to sit in on a few of these merchant webinars they were doing and kind of give a little bit of my perspective. And what I noticed was that there was some confusion about product pins and the Shop tab. And so I wanted to take some of that and bring it into today's episode. If you are an E commerce shop owner and you're listening to this and maybe this is the first time you've even heard the words verified Merchant program or Shop Tab on Pinterest and you've been curious about how to connect all these integrations or you're just simply curious about whether or not Pinterest is the next marketing channel for you to use for your products. There are so many E commerce sellers out there who are not using Pinterest, it kind of blows my mind. So if you're looking for a team to get you set up and kind of give you a really great plan for Pinterest, we can do that for you. We have a specific service that we have here at simplepin Media, which is an E commerce Kickstart program. This includes an audit of your account, a setup and build of your account to connect, helping you connect with developers, to get all the tech connections set up. We also do a deep dive into images and helping you create really great images that are separate from your shop images and they display your products in a really cool and creative ways that gets clicks, that gets saves, and in addition to a strategy call that really helps you set the tone for where you're going to go from here. You can scroll down below in YouTube, it'll be in the description in all of your podcast apps and it'll be in your description as well. So click on that and book a call with our team to figure out if this service is really a good fit for you. Okay, so let's do a quick baseline. I'm also going to link down below in the description all of the links to the documentation that Pinterest has that will tell you if you qualify for these programs. One of the biggest distinguishers I want to say right now is that in order to become a verified merchant, you do need to self host. This means you need to have a Shopify store or WooCommerce or there's several others in there as well. But you need to have that in order to connect your in order to connect your shop catalog. Right. So you can't necessarily connect your shop with Etsy or with teachers, pay teachers. These are what we refer to as like third party hosted. You can't do that, unfortunately. So, so one of the things that you want to think about is do you want to be self hosted or not? Some people don't want to be, which is totally fine. But I'm going to leave a link to all the requirements that the verified merchant program requires you to have. So what is it? The verified merchant program is essentially a way of identifying trustworthy sellers and kind of giving them enhanced visibility on the platform. It's totally free, you don't have to pay for it. But there definitely are some requirements and here are two that I'm going to call out that I think people miss. If you are a new shop seller, your domain age has to be over 13 months. Pinterest wants to see an established business with a track record. So if you got your domain two months ago, you cannot apply for this six months ago, one year ago, you needs to be 13 months. The other thing is you must have a Pinterest business account that has been active for at least three months. You need to have a Pinterest business account anyway if you're going to be doing any type of business on the platform. If you're a shop owner or if you're a content creator, it is wise to have a business account. Not only do you get really great access to features that are super helpful for you and your business, but it's actually against terms of service to do business and not have a business account. So make sure you do that again. These two are actually also trust signals. So they show that you are going to be in it to win it for a longer amount of time. You're not just going to whip up a domain whip, whip up a business account and start selling stuff and then close up shop two months later. Okay, so there are some common confusion points that we have heard about. We do have someone that we work with in tech and she has had some frustration with a verified merchant program. I want you to understand that there are two things we're going to extract at this moment. We have the verified merchant program, which is essentially like a separate verification that gives you a badge. There's a bunch of cool benefits. I am a verified merchant merchant. You can see that on my profile. I have a little like red check mark and it really helps get your catalog connected onto Pinterest and it shows that you're like a trustworthy merchant. Okay, then there is connecting your catalog. This is something they brought up to within Pinterest presents. These are both free. But the connecting your catalog simply allows Pinterest to pull in all of your product information. The reason we love this as like step one, connect your catalog is because you have inventory that is constantly changing in volume. You also have pricing that is constantly changing. This catalog is refreshed every 24 hours with the latest information. So what this means is that if a user on Pinterest is searching really great candles for fall and they have saved one of yours to a board board, their fall board. And maybe they did it back in August and it was really hot in August and they weren't thinking about buying candles. But it is October now, and they are really excited to buy this candle. Okay, well, let's say in August, Your candle was $25, but in October you're running a sale, and now it's 1999. That will be reflected on the product pin, even though the user pinned it back in August. So are you with me? Do you see the benefits here? Like, it's really, really helpful so that if you didn't have your catalog connected and somebody pinned it back in August and it was $25, it would still say $25. I mean, they'd be delighted and surprised to come to your website to see that it's 1999. But the cool part is, is they can actually see that on the pin before they even get to your website, increasing the chances that they're going to purchase. So it's a win win. So again, the Verified Merchant program is separate. It's a verification that gives you a badge and some additional benefits. And it helps connect your catalog, too. And there's this connect your catalog, which is totally separate. You do need to connect your catalog for Verified Merchant, but having a catalog doesn't automatically make you verified. Okay, there you go. Now we get into this, like, confusion point. So let's say you've connected your catalog, right? A common question is, I connected my catalog, so why isn't it pinning for me? It says it's going to update every 24 hours and new pins are going to go out. Why isn't it doing it? This is a total common misunderstanding. The catalog connection doesn't automatically create pins across Pinterest. It makes your products that are available as product pins that can be discovered through search and recommendations. So they used to have this shop tab. It was actually really confusing. It was on your profile and you could see all the pins and it kind of gave you this illusion that things were being pinned all the time. But let's think of it like go back to that candle analogy. So when you connect your shop, right, all of a sudden all of your product pins are living out on Pinterest, right? They're. They're just out there. Well, when somebody searches Fall Pumpkin spice Candle, it's going to pull up all the products it has available to it to pull, right? And then that person gets to search through, and all of a sudden they see the beautiful like, oh, this is the fall candle that I want. I buy a Cambo online, by the way, because I couldn't smell it. But maybe some of you are a little bit bold and you would, right? So then they Save that. So it's not necessarily that it's like being pinned every day, but it's living out in the Pinterest universe, just waiting to be served up and discovered. Now, you also need to actively create pins and you can tag your products because your catalog's connected and then people can engage with it that way. This was such a point of confusion for the group that I was sat in on that was in the Merchant inclusion fund and they were trying to figure out all of this. So think of it like this. You have this automatic thing happening where your product pins, they live in this sea of pins on Pinterest, like I said, just waiting to be served up, which is really great. And then you manually, through Canva, because we love Canva, or maybe another program, create a two to three sized image, which is a vertical image. People on Pinterest love these vertical images. And suddenly you create an image where you show this pumpkin spot, ice candle in an environment that's very fall in a living room, maybe very cozy. Like, I can never say the word. It's hygge. I think it is. It's like the Scandinavian word for like, cozy. I'm sure somebody's going to tell me that I got that wrong, which I'm a thousand percent sure I did. But let's just say that you want to show that and maybe you want to use that particular search term. And then you take tag that candle in that image and then that pin leads back to your website where they can also buy it. Now, I get that this is a little bit of a point of confusion. Like, wait, what? There's two things happening? Yes, there's two things happening. You have this beautiful image that you created where you showcase your candle, you link that pin image to your website. Because we never ever, ever upload an image to Pinterest or without a link, never, ever, ever, ever. Did we get that? Never, ever. So then you can in addition tag the candle so they can go straight to the listing. This is really helpful if you are creating content around fall aesthetic or maybe you're trying to tackle some of the trends on Pinterest. So you don't want to assume, because it's not that the catalog is pinning for you, you want to create some of your own pins so that people can save those as well. Think of it as like double duty, right? You're like getting a twofer with both of these things. So then that leads to the question of, like, why can't I see my product pins? Okay, so here's where we need to address that, like Shop tab removal because it created some confusion. So Pinterest made this shift because they found a majority of people using Pinterest, they came with shopping intent, right? Like they weren't necessarily going to your profile. Like they weren't going to go to simplepin Media, click on my Shop tab and then purchase. Right? That's not how it's going to work. They were just going to engage with these product pins when they were searching or browsing. Therefore, the need for a Shop tab within a profile just really wasn't necessary. We can just remove it. So don't think that your pins are not seen. They are seen. Okay. So this means for you that your products are still visible. They're just not in one centralized tab in your profile. They're discoverable through these areas. Visual search in related pins and recommendations. There's this place on Pinterest where if you're in the app, I kind of like to call this the black hole of Pinterest where you can go down a rabbit trail and you actually don't even know how to get back. You click on a pin image and then you scroll down below and you'll see this. More like this. And then you'll see product pins and you'll click on something else and you'll see product pins and you'll see regular content pins. This is where you see related pins and recommendations. Also, there are shoppable video features and then also products come up in just your regular feed. If I've been searching things like fall pumpkin, spice, your candle has a greater opportunity to make it into my feed because I am interested in it. Okay, so then how do you get your products seen on Pinterest? Like I just outlined those two ways, which were the Shop tab and. And creating an image with tagging. Tagging your products is really, really important. We are heavy advocates of creating content for any type of business on Pinterest. People on Pinterest are curious and they're fact finders. They, they want to know more, right? So they may not directly come to a product listing and say yes right away, but they might come to a blank blog post that is a roundup. It's where people talk about making money off of affiliate marketing. With Pinterest, this is the big way that they're talking about it is they create a blog post that talks about how to create the perfect fall cozy home. So when you're creating that image and you're tagging the product in the image, it's really, really Important. The next step that's important. And this really tends to confuse people who haven't used Pinterest before, is creating dedicated boards with product pins. I heard this example years ago from somebody who was in the beauty industry, and I thought it was just so genius. And I. I really haven't seen anybody do it since. But I'm. I'm sure somebody is. But they created a board with all of their different colors of eyeshadow in their shop. And this board was titled something very specific. It could have even been fall trending eyeshadow looks. And it had all of these particular products in, like, a collection. And then they shared that board with their audience, and they asked them to vote on their favorite eyeshadow for fall. So not only were they trying to get engagement, but they had this really cool place where they could showcase in a different way all of the eyeshadows they had for fall. So create boards around trending topics that correlate with your products. Want you to think of your Pinterest profile a little bit like a storefront window, not your entire store. So even though, like, she could have had a collection about all of her amazing eyeshadows, she took it and she created a spin on it with a board that really highlighted a season, which maybe she didn't want to do with her store. So that's another way to feature your products. Okay, so I spent some time in the Pinterest business community. I'll leave a link to to it below. It is really helpful if you want to go and ask questions of the Pinterest team. They have some moderators there. They have some really helpful people who are helping out in that community. And somebody asked this. I have a shop board where some products have been posted as pins, but I'm also recently approved for the Verified Merchant program. It is. Is. Is it not? No, let me rephrase that. Is it necessary to have this board any longer since being in the Verified Merchant program is essentially now my shop? No, the Verified Merchant Program is not your shop. It's simply a verification badge. So here's the distinction. Verified Merchant Program is a trust signal. It appears on your profile and your pins. Your boards, including your shop boards, are kind of like merchandising and curation. So if you have a board, that's a really good thing based on the example that I just shared. Right. Because that gives visibility to more of your products. So here's some best practices. Keep your shop board or multiple shop boards or product focus boards definitely on your profile. Play around with them add different products to different boards. The Verified Merchant Program badge will appear on those pins and your profile, you want to think again of your boards like categories or collections, especially as it relates to seasonality. On Pinterest Verified Merchant Program, that verification works with your content strategy, not instead of it. That was a really good question by the way, and I could see how people would be confused. So let's kind of wrap this up. Verified Merchant Program, yes, is really important. If you don't want to go for that, you definitely want to connect your catalog, right? That's super, super important. If you want to apply for Verified Merchant Program, there is several requirements. Some have said it's a little bit finicky, some are annoyed by the appeals process. Some people are a little salty about it. So just know going into it you could have a little bit of a bumpy road ahead. Totally fine. As long as you go in with eyes wide open. The Verified Merchant Program and connecting your catalog can enhance the visibility in search and recommendations for your products. It is a no brainer if you are an E commerce seller. This gives you access to more shopping features, more analytics so you really can figure out what is selling or or not selling. Okay, so if you are an E commerce seller and you need help with this, number one, don't forget that we can help you. But number two, scroll down below and check out the links just to see if this is the next step you want to take. If you have any questions you can always email us. Hello simplepinmedia.com or you can comment below this video and let us know where you're at with Pinterest. Or maybe you have questions. Maybe you're also already a Verified Merchants Program participant or you've connected your catalog and you're still a little confused. We would love to hear from you because we would love to be able to answer those. Alrighty. Thanks so much for listening.