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Comment by minouye | Hacker News Reader

"People, mainly women at the moment, are creating mood/story boards which mostly contain pictures of products."

I keep hearing this, but I find it goes against my own experience on the site and that of other hardcore users that I know. Food, hair, nails, tattoos, quotes, amazing pictures, unique crafts/accessories (via Etsy), aspiration products, and amazing travel pictures yes. Anything being sold by a retailer seems few and far between.

If anyone knows of anything other than anectdotal evidence that users are actually actively pinning products, I'd be really interested to read more.

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A client of mine sells classroom decorations and teacher resources. We recently added a Pinterest share button to each product page which has increased our traffic from Pinterest significantly. The conversion rate from Pinterest traffic averages between 6 and 10 percent. Conversion rate from Facebook traffic: .40%, Twitter: .08%.

How do pinterest users discover new content like yours?

Same way as people find new tweets. By following others and by having others follow you.

WOW! Those numbers are crazy and precisely why I wrote the blog post.

I have some products on Pinterest and I've been a little disappointed at how well they convert, considering how many boards they're on: http://pinterest.com/source/faucetface.com

Here's where* my paying customers have come from in the past 6 months:

Direct: 69%

Google: 17%

Blog/press mentions: 6%

Pinterest .52%

I recall a blogger recently who reasoned that women are using Pinterest as a substitute for making real purchases. And that the act of pinning things feels similar to hitting the buy now button.

That feels about right to me.

*I know it doesn't add up to 100 - paypal is taking credit as a source of traffic for some reason.

What about conversion rate? That looks to be a limited number of pins, so you can't be getting much traffic from them.

>the act of pinning things feels similar to hitting the buy now button.

Female perspective: that's not quite true. If you want to buy something for now, you'll buy it. It's more like a keeping a scrapbook of things you like to buy one day, when money and space is not an issue. Like for when you buy a house, or get an end-of-year bonus or gift ideas to remember for later.

I think his point was that there used to be no option for 'have it, but not have it.' You would either buy the pretty thing, or not. There was no good way to save it in a scrapbook or anything.

Pinterest allows that middle ground that wasn't there before. Those red pumps that you thought were amazing, but never really wear? You could have just pinned up a picture of them on pinterest and revisited them any time you want, without a purchase.

If you really want to -wear- the shoes, then a purchase is necessary. But if you want to look at them more than wear them, then the picture is fine.

Yes, there was a way to have it but not have it. When I was in high school 25 years ago, they tore it out of magazines and put it up on their locker door, the cover of their notebook, or on the wall of their bedroom. More recently, my wife had a folder of stuff. MySpace pages and photobucket albums used to have a lot of aspirational imagery, and even today, that is a big use of Tumblr.

Pinterest is a nicely targeted version of things that women have been doing online in other ways for the last decade, and offline for much longer.

Compete has some details here http://blog.compete.com/2012/01/05/affiliates-pining-for-pin...

Pinterest uses Skimlinks to turn all links to retail sites into affiliate links (and in turn they get affiliate money). From the article it looks like this is a good amount of traffic.

I agree with this, and perhaps that is why there are no affiliate links yet, from that list (and my brief, over-the-shoulder viewing of Pinterest) I only know of some "nails" postings that either contain in the picture or in the text/comments, the name of the product used in this case.

Users are not pinning the direct BestBuy link to their new headphones, but they are pinning "My new pair of Grado xxxxx are awesome!". Thats where Pinterest has the data, and could go to work to provide easy access to those products.

I based it simply on the data that was available (see the link in the blog post).

I see a TechCrunch post and a ReadWriteWeb post that rehashes Google AdPlanner data, but nothing that supports the idea that Pinterest has a large number of products from established merchants. I definitely agree with your other points about the ability to mine insights, create a demand platform, etc. but I think that it's predicated on users actively using the service as a virtual wishlist (a realistic one and not aspirational).

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