How Pinterest Influencers Are Driving Traffic to eBay

As social media site Pinterest has delved into the world of online shopping, auction site eBay is wanting in on the action with Pinterest Influencers. This had led the image discovery platform to become one of the biggest sites for driving traffic back toward eBay and eBay does not want to lose momentum.
We look at how eBay has used Pinterest Influencers effectively.

The Senior Director of Social Commerce for eBay, Brad Matthews has reiterated that Pinterest is the only marketing channel that can get you to make purchases without you shopping based on brand. Pinterest can bring new customers to eBay by using eBay’s existing customers.
With Pinterest, pinners find ideas and pictures of a huge array of websites and pin the pictures to their digital pin board. With the new ability for Pinterest users to purchase the items they have seen on the social media site, the way Pinterest is working with its users is changing. And as you can “follow” your friends on Pinterest and see what they are pinning as well, existing eBay customers may pin something they have seen or purchased there, showing it to their Pinterest friends.
eBay was slammed by Google last year for misusing the search engine through SEO work on auctions. The penalty for the misuse has been estimated at $200 million, forcing eBay to recoup the costs any way they can.

One solution they are working on is called “collections,” which is user-created content that helps people find posts that were worth pinning. With collections, users can find “how to” posts. With those you can pin a link to an eBay post on Pinterest, which eBay will then put on its Pinterest page and promote the link. This is resulting in a high rate of re-pins as well as increase traffic to eBay looking for the pinned product.
In order to continue this form of success, eBay has been working on creating as many as 50 hand-curated pins weekly and testing them to gauge how well it’s working. They have been working with top influencers on Pinterest such as automotive lifestyle brand Carhoots and have showed some impressive results.
 
For example the following humorous pin has been repinned 36438 times Creating over 200k views to just one article. Phenomenal!
It was discovered in July that eBay is the top advertiser on Pinterest, just like they had gotten on board with Facebook’s ads early. It has also been said that eBay is also focusing on channels with Instagram, Tumblr, Snapchat, and Periscope. While their work with social media is still in its infancy, the traffic to eBay through social media is growing at an estimated rate of over 100% a year in the United States alone.
The buyable pin function on Pinterest was started last summer for the Pinterest app through Apple devices and is expected to be launching the same function for Android devices in the very near future. Pinterest has also rolled out a new function called the “visual search,” meaning when you see something within a pin that you want to know more about, you will see pins just like it. The search engine can even be filtered to hone in what you were really looking for.
An example of a visual search is looking at a blouse, for example, then zooming in on it to see exactly what it is and where you can buy it.
The face of eBay has changed quite a lot over the years, so it should not be a complete surprise that Pinterest is also changing. Remember, eBay was originally an auction site where people could find the odd things they were looking for from people around the world. It then evolved to include eBay stores and a “buy it now” function, making it far more than a simple auction site.

Pinterest had begun as a virtual pin-board for pictures that people wanted to save and look at later. People use it for a huge array of purposes; crafts, cooking, workouts, inspiration, and, most recently, shopping. When you pin something it goes on a board that is put in your friends’ pin feed so others can see what you have found. Your friends, as well as others, then have the option to re-pin it themselves in one of their personal boards so they can look at it again later. Even if it was originally your pin, it can be endlessly re-pinned and reach people that you never even imagined.
The marketability on Pinterest is completely different for retailers. Users are not shopping for a set brand or store, but instead are searching for something that meets an interest. As a result, they could be purchasing things from any online shopping site, since they weren’t set on one to begin with.
If eBay can make enough pinned posts that could reach the right Pinterest users, they can easily drive more sales to their site and generate shoppers that they could not have had access to otherwise.