Pinterest is reportedly trying to launch a 'Buy' button this year
This report comes hot on the heels of Pinterest's rollout of its first-ever truly actionable pins. As of Thursday, users can download iPhone or iPad apps they see on Pinterest without leaving the site - all you need to do is press a new "Install" button.
The basic idea of Pinterest is that users upload pictures, or "pins," to "boards," and can re-pin the photos of other users. Every pin links to a website and many product pins have information like pricing and availability, though you still need to click through to the website the pin originated from to buy.
A "Buy" button could change all that.
Right now, Pinterest already controls a whopping 23% of referral traffic to e-commerce sites. Plus, Pinterest users are 10% more likely to make a purchase than people who arrive from other social networks and they spend twice as much as users who come from Facebook, according to data from Shopify. Those numbers indicate that a "Buy" button on the social network makes sense.
Del Rey reports that Pinterest will likely partner with the payments company Stripe to power its new Buy button.