PinPointing: Zappos’ Clever New Tool To Monetize Pinterest

What do you do when your customers share a lot on Pinterest, but all that sharing doesn’t drive the revenue needle?

If you’re Zappos, you launch a nifty new site that turns Pinterest activity into shopping recommendations. It’s called PinPointing and it’s the first of what could eventually become a standard tool for retailers … assuming that it starts to drive more revenue.

Zappos: Twitter Orders Average More Revenue Than Facebook & Pinterest

Zappos has been getting mixed results from Pinterest.

The Amazon-owned retailer tells Bloomberg that its customers share more often on Pinterest than on Facebook and Twitter, but revenue from Pinterest is significantly lower: $33.66 per order from Twitter posts, $2.08 per order from Facebook posts and only 75 cents per order from Pinterest.

Says Will Young, director of Zappos Labs:

Even if a person has 100,000 followers on Pinterest and she pins something to a board called ‘Stuff I Love,’ that’s not as big a deal as an endorsement tweeted to 10,000 followers.

Enter PinPointing

That’s where the new PinPointing site comes in. Pinterest has given its blessing for the experimental tool that lets Zappos customers get product suggestions based on Pinterest activity.

Zappos suggests ten “featured pinners” on the page and shows Zappos-only products that they’ve pinned. Shoppers can also enter any Pinterest username and PinPointing will analyze his/her pins and boards and make product recommendations from Zappos’ website — even if the pins don’t exactly match what Zappos sells.

It’s a clever tool, but clever doesn’t always translate to revenue. If it works for Zappos, though, expect other retailers to follow suit with their own Pinterest-based recommendation tools.