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Pinterest Makes Buy Buttons Available to Thousands More Merchants

Sixty million Buyable pins is a lot, until you remember Pinterest has tens of billions of pins.

Pinterest
Jason Del Rey
Jason Del Rey has been a business journalist for 15 years and has covered Amazon, Walmart, and the e-commerce industry for the last decade. He was a senior correspondent at Vox.

Pinterest is hoping to be a shopping destination this holiday season, and it’s adding more partners to make that clear to shoppers.

The popular online image board says it has partnered with e-commerce software providers Bigcommerce, Magento and IBM Commerce to give thousands more merchants the ability to sell products on the platform through Pinterest’s new Buyable Pin program. Pinterest previously announced partnerships with software companies Shopify and Demandware. All five of these partners make software that businesses use to set up and run online stores, allowing Pinterest to sign up way more merchants than it could on its own.

The partner expansion comes four months after Pinterest first announced the e-commerce program, which makes certain products available for purchase directly on Pinterest in its iPhone and iPad apps. Pinterest, Twitter and Facebook have all added e-commerce features to their platforms in the last year. The efforts are geared toward taking advantage of their giant audiences as well as retailers’ desire to reach customers where they are already spending a lot of time online. Just last week, Twitter announced deals with some of the same e-commerce software companies.

Pinterest said there are now 60 million pins displaying products that can be bought right on Pinterest, from merchants big and small, including Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s. Though that number is big, it still comprises much less than 1 percent of total pins on the service. As a result, Pinterest is spending a lot of time figuring out how to make shoppable pins easy to discover without forcing them on users who are browsing Pinterest but not in shopping mode. Pinterest also expects to make money from merchants who will pay to promote their own products in buyable pins more broadly. Pinterest does not take a cut of sales.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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