Pinterest Buy Button — everyone knew it was coming….

-- 2015 blog article, reposting here in its new home --

When I saw the news flash that pinterest will be soon launching or just launched the Buy Button on their boards along side their defacto “pinIT” — I was like.. its about time they launched it.. wasn’t very surprised and I guess not many were surprised as well.. as it seemed as the next logical step to err..well..monetize.

Although not widely popularized, as is usually..sometimes, Amazon launched Amazon Stream earlier this year with pinterest sort of layout and deviating greatly from Amazon’s standard shopping patterns at other sections of the site

These two products are direct competition for each other and it is going to be interesting to see who has the last laugh in this race to woo the Apparel shopping bandwagon. Although Amazon has proved to be omni-present, pioneer in the online shopping across a variety of categories.. Apparel and Fashion shopping is something that has eluded Amazon for quite sometime now. From its experiments on Endless.com, to MyHabbit.com, to ShopBob it has been a whirlwind ride.

Although recently Amazon has pumped in serious focus into Apparel with its Gateway pages almost always having some banner ad or other to do with Apparel shopping. Amazon also launched its own line of “Designer clothes”to take on the fact that some high-end fashion stores just don't want to list on Amazon for the mere noise and co-mingling with other not-so-saucy brands.

Pinterest had to pivot towards shopping as it was the best and perhaps the only sensible way to monetize (ads are good…but meh..from customer pain perspective). Earlier Pinterest started monetizing as Affiliates links and not sure why it did not leave it as is operating along side the buy buttons.

I am a dude and not the biggest user of Pinterest and probably I don’t get it..but i guess my trouble is “how do I differentiate a buy-button-pin vs a just pure pin-it” and i am not asking about the button (i do know they come different color and shape). As I understand the pin-in button appears on all posts..while the buy-button will show up along side in some of the posts. Wouldn’t that be confusing…?

My point is I am not sure the claims that “Pinterest buy button will win over Amazon’s stream” doesn’t necessary hold good and is not clear yet — how and if it will win over at all

My 2 cent prediction..

Pinterest will try to promote and make the buy button more ubiquitous and in those efforts learn more about shopping than just “pinning”. Pinterest will pivot to experiment new stuff around buy-button since i don’t believe as-is isn’t lucrative & simple enough

Amazon on similar lines will promote and experiment Stream and hopefully they revamp the entire site shopping experience