Pinterest hones its online shopping experience with a host of new features

With the rise of online shopping, e-commerce platforms are coming up with all kinds of ways to offer consumers experiences similar to those of bricks-and-mortar stores.

Pinterest, for example, has unveiled new features available in France, Canada, Germany and Australia, to improve the online shopping experience on its site. 

The pandemic has served to accelerate some of the changes already underway in consumer buying habits around the world. The closure of bricks-and-mortar stores -- especially in the fashion sector -- unsurprisingly helped give e-commerce a boost -- a trend that looks set to continue long after the pandemic. The sector's main players are therefore working hard to optimize the online shopping experience, and creating ways of transposing the services offered in stores onto the web.

A life-sized storefront

This is what Pinterest is hoping to achieve with its new freshly-launched features for shoppers, as well as for sellers. The image-based social media platform, which already lets users save inspirations and favorite products, now offers them a "Shopping List" -- a kind of virtual storefront grouping together all the product Pins they have previously saved.

As well as finding the products they want to buy in one quick click, users will see a host of information about those products, including price, reviews and delivery, allowing them to compare items as they decide what to buy. Plus, like on many e-commerce platforms, users can receive notifications when the price of favorite items drops.

Shopping products based on real-world inspirations

Users of the social media platform can now purchase items from their search bar through a new "Shop" tab featuring 100% shoppable results. Moreover, the "Pinterest Lens" feature makes use of the platform's camera to let users capture real-life inspirations then run visual searches on the platform to find similar items. From the physical to the digital, in just one click...

This new shopping experience will be rounded off with expert-selected content designed to inspire users and help them discover new products and brands -- like a sort of virtual trends book. Called "Shopping Spotlights," this feature will spotlight content selected by industry experts, and styled in the manner of a magazine. The experience will kick off with product selections based on the platform's trends curated by various specialist media partners.

Note that Pinterest is also launching "The Goods by Pinterest," with a selection of products offered as limited editions for two weeks. The items will be sold exclusively on the platform by emerging brands based in various countries. However, this feature will initially only be available to users in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada.