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Comment by mtgentry | Hacker News Reader

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.

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>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.

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

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