Pinterest introduces Shopping bag: Has it learned from the failure of other social networks?

In the bid to monetise, Pinterest is moving beyond being an eye-candy with its new Shopping bag feature and a host of other updates. It wants to turn the social or rather ‘discovery’ network into a shopping site. Something many have tried in the past, but didn’t emerge successful. What’s new So, Pinterest lets users select items from across the web and purchase them via buyable pins that were introduced last year. But, the company now makes it easier as one won’t have to deal with multiple steps and make the purchase with a single transaction. This is enabled with what the service calls a Shopping bag, which is nothing but an online shopping cart. Moreover, the pins that were available only on apps, are being introduced for the web.  To enhance the shopping experience, the company has introduced newer ways to discover products. You can use the visual search icon on top of a pin and find similar products. Moreover, discovering new products will be simpler with the ability to view what are other popular items from a particular merchant if you’ve selected a specific product from his portfolio. Shopping on social a failure Social is to connect and e-commerce sites are for shopping. That’s what we’ve learned every time a social network has decided to embed a buy button. Remember how Flipkart wanted to add a dash of social to shopping with Ping, but later planned to convert it into a user-seller platform. An even bigger example of is of Twitter whose ambitious Buy button plans in a desperate attempt to monetise and please investors fell flat as the company is believed to have canned the feature. Afterall, Twitter was all about venting out frustrations and opinions. Not many could relate to logging into Twitter for shopping. We  have even been hearing about Facebook’s plans to introduce in-app transaction for Messenger. However, plans were always confined to rumours, and there was never a concrete announcement. This has led us to believing, and rightly so, that marrying social and shopping won’t be a good idea. Pinterest has the potential to drive in change Pinterest has always been about discovery. That’s what sets it apart from rest, and that’s what could exactly work in its favour. A recent Mary Meeker report (via Pinterest blogpost) pointed out that 55 percent of people believe Pineterst is a place for shopping, while only 12 percent said its a social network. About 93 percent people said that they use the site to plan purchases, while 87 percent have made a purchase after seeing a product they liked. Pinterest  is also said to have about 20000 merchants onboard with over 10 million unique products in the catelogue. Making their intentions clear, the site also has a new Shop section with organised product categories and merchants too.  As aforemetioned, the company has focused on visual search abilities, a visually pleasing site is something Pinterest is known for. So, the image search enhancement is a great move that eliminates the need to manually highlight an area, and you can visual search by tapping the sots placed on the images to make it convenient. VentureBeat highlights that the technology is based on artificial intelligence wherein neural networks are trained on photos and getting newer, similar data, and of course there will be the buy option. The new features will be rolling out in the coming months, just in time for the holiday season. If Pinterest manages to execute it well and get some popular brands onboard, it may shift the paradigm for social shopping.