One of the newest social networks, Pinterest, may be about to achieve something that neither Facebook, Google+ or Twitter have been unable to accomplish at scale. No, it’s not creating a social network made up almost entirely of women. Pinterest may be preparing to monetize all of those shared photos of things you wish you owned, which could make the social network one of the stickiest e-commerce destinations ever.
The Rise of Pinning
Unlike millions of women, I am not a fan of Pinterest. I have spent a total of 45 minutes on the site and at least 30 of those were to research an article. It seems I am again an anomaly.
According to data from comScore, Pinterest now has 11.7 million unique U.S. visitors per month. This means the infinitely scrolling photo collecting site has managed to attract 10 million unique visitors per month faster than any other standalone website in history. No, not just among social networks. Faster than any site in the U.S. Ever.
Users spend over 98 minutes on the site per month. Only Facebook, which consumes 7 hours of users’ time per month, and Tumblr, where users spend 2.5 hours each month, keep users’ attention longer.
According to Experian Hitwise, Pinterest is also number three, right behind Facebook and Twitter in terms of total visits. What’s even more notable, the majority of Pinterest users are women between 18 and 44, and almost 30 percent of visitors have an income of at least US$ 100,000.
The rapid growth of an engaged audience ripe for buying has left many industry observers wondering exactly how Pinterest planned on monetizing its popular site. We just received a big clue.
The large Japanese e-commerce company Rakuten has confirmed it is leading a US$ 100 million investment in Pinterest, which will help the network expand to more international markets and solidify its business model.
Pinning on Dollars
Hiroshi Mikitani, CEO of Rakuten, expressed in the company’s official announcement how excited he is about combining the love Pinterest users have pinning things they might want to buy with his company’s model for e-commerce.
Rakuten is extremely strong in Japan. The company reports that 75 percent of Japanese Internet users have an account on their platform. However, the company’s reach is limited to Asia. Rakuten also owns Buy.com, France based Priceminister, Brazil based Ikeda, Germany based Tradoria and U.K. based Play.com.
Pinterest has already increased referral traffic to many retailers of items like women’s clothing and books. It is unclear what the next steps will be for the company beyond the start of a new funding round scheduled to begin on Friday, which is also the dayFacebook launches its IPO.
Although no official statements have been released, it doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to foresee a future Pinterest where commerce is tightly integrated with content. Each image can be used as advertising, pinned images could trigger promotions and product suggestions and single clicks could add items to a shopping cart. If implemented correctly and unobtrusively, Pinterest’s potential to sell goods could vastly exceed the current leader in social advertising, Facebook.
This post was written by Josette Rigsby and was published originally in CMS Wire
Rakuten, the largest e-commerce site in Japan, is expected to be the lead investor in the much-contested next round of funding for Silicon Valley’s hottest start-up, Pinterest.
According to AllThingsD, the funding is expected to be announced on May 17.
The Tokyo-based Internet giant will invest upwards of $50 million in a $100 million round that values the social bookmarking phenom at $1.5 billion.
There might other individual investors in the new round, but those were still to be determined tonight by Pinterest co-founder and CEO Ben Silbermann. Read more
A report from Campalyst found that the most successful ecommerce companies are boosting their success with social media marketing campaigns that favor a multi-platform approach. By maintaining presences on different social networks, businesses have found they can target segments of their audiences most active on these platforms.
According to the study, 97 percent of the top 250 vendors on the web maintain Facebook accounts, generating Likes from their fans. Twitter has attracted 96 percent of these top vendors that say they use the site to engage consumers. Read more
Alternative Payments (AP) are becoming far more prevalent in the world of safe shopping online, with a new study from Worldpay suggesting that in three years time, the use of credit cards will represent less than half of all e-commerce transactions.
AP covers a variety of technologies, from straightforward online bank transfers and established services like PayPal, to newer NFC (near filed communication) services and digital wallets integrated into smartphones.
At the moment, just under a quarter of all online transactions are made by AP, but by 2015, it is anticipated that this will be the dominant form of e-commerce payment.
2015 will also be a landmark year for the total value of the global e-commerce market, which is expected to be worth over a trillion pounds, almost double the £605 billion it is worth today. Read more
Last week, a Swedish company by the name of Wrapp made its way stateside, bringing with it a new mobile app that is helping to make “social gifting” the new buzzword in e-commerce.
Interested in what this new app had to offer, I tried it myself. I quickly found that its potential success hinges solely on the fact that it provides a positive customer experience, which can be the make or break factor in an organizations’ e-commerce strategy.
By allowing users to give a mobile gift card from Starbucks, H&M, or other popular retailers to friends on their birthday or any other special event — which social sites like Facebook already promote — Wrapp is blurring the lines of cross-channel commerce and making it easier than ever for consumers to shop how they want, when they want, and where they want. Read more
The pieces are in place for Facebook’s IPO next week—not only has the company set its stock price range and updated its Q1 numbers, it has also attempted to de-risk the biggest perceived risk in the first draft of its S-1: exposure to mobile competition. Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion, which ostensibly will help it approach mobile social interaction in a more engaging way. But it hasn’t done anything to address its exposure to other addictive consumer applications that could whittle away at its users’ engagement over time. Namely, the most risky applications involve social commerce, and the elephant in the room as it relates to physical goods, not virtual goods, is Pinterest.
There are rumors that Facebook will announce a major eCommerce move just before its IPO in May. That is still possible, but given that its social commerce brainchild, Beacon, flopped in 2007, an unproven eCommerce-related endeavor branded by Facebook would be a hugely risky move. Unlike its answer to potential competition in the mobile space, Facebook is leaving eCommerce risk unanswered one way or the other. Read more
Your website is your place of business. Your customers are all over the world. These ideas are commonplace in the 21st century, but think about these amazing concepts for a minute. Twenty years ago, it would have seemed impossible for a small business person like yourself to start and run a company that used the Internet not just to advertise, but to perform all its marketing, order-taking, and sales functions, too. Many small business owners run three or four online companies. We’re not saying it’s easy. But if you know a few essentials, you can reach whatever goal you set for your ecommerce company. Read more
Traditional eCommerce has a problem: Most consumers are basically unhappy about some aspect of the purchase process most of the time. Conventional wisdom puts online shopping cart abandonment at 75 percent, but it has been a struggle to find a solution. With the “app-ification” of content and the advent of the social Web, it’s important for online merchants to have the tools needed to break down the barriers to purchase that have plagued traditional eCommerce.
What seems to be emerging is a new type of eCommerce model. Called “agile commerce” by some and “open commerce” by others, the distinguishing factor of this new eCommerce model is that an open commerce model enables consumers to make purchases, or access content directly from the source. The traditional eCommerce experience is very static, and downright boring, requiring buyers to visit a specific website, through a specific application (the browser) and enter quite a bit of personal payment and delivery information.
The ideas behind a more open eCommerce model eliminate the boundaries between consumer desire and deliverability, providing a personalized platform that removes the obstacles between what people want, and what they can easily get. It is a transactional experience that is as seamless as it is social and as painless as it is gratifying. Open eCommerce means no more hassling with pop-up windows or site redirects; in fact, shoppers may not even need to open a Web browser. The ability to purchase products and services frictionlessly, without being bounced all over the Internet to do it, defines this new eCommerce model. Read more
Pin2Sell.com, a new site that allows anyone with a PayPal account to create purchasable products and post them directly on Pinterest, launched on April 20. Created by Clique Studios, an interactive and eCommerce agency based in Chicago, the service is completely free and enables users to sell items without signing up for any additional services.
With over 10 million users, Pinterest’s base is intensely loyal, spending 88 minutes bookmarking every day. They are also social, driving more third-party traffic than Google, LinkedIn and YouTube combined.
“It just seems like the perfect place for social commerce,” said Ted Novak. “Pin2Sell makes it incredibly easy and integrated. Just take a picture, enter the price and your PayPal account, and your Pin can be purchased by anybody who is interested in it.” Read more
Last year, the buzzword in e-commerce was Groupon Inc and its myriad of competitors that offered daily online coupons to entice shoppers in a down economy. Now, the latest fashion in retail is social gifting, where people get together on Facebook to buy each other gifts.
Start-ups such as Sweden-based Wrapp, which is launching its U.S. business on Monday, are getting millions of dollars in venture-capital funding, and retailers like Best Buy Co Inc , Gap Inc and Starbucks Corp are scurrying to be a part of it.
‘Brick-and-mortar retailers are all looking for new, more efficient ways to drive sales into stores without diluting their brands … we wanted to really see how retailers can leverage the megatrends of smartphones and social networks,’ said Hjalmar Winbladh, chief executive of Wrapp.
Wrapp is essentially an app that can run on smartphones, tablets and computers. It allows Facebook friends to buy each other gift cards from participating retailers either individually or by teaming up, which they can store on their mobile devices and redeem either online or inside physical stores. Retailers like it because there is little marketing cost and because customers often end up buying more once they are inside the store. Read more
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