Pinterest isn’t just one of the hottest social networks in the game today, it’s also one of the fastest growing platforms for social commerce.
Monetate’s latest quarterly eCommerce report shows that Pinterest was responsible for directing more traffic to eCommerce websites in 2013’s first quarter than it did in the final holiday shopping quarter of 2012.
Compared to Q4 2012, the traffic generated by the collection of social networks evaluated in the EQ is almost universally flat or declining. But the outlier is Pinterest, which sent more traffic to ecommerce websites in the first quarter than it did in the retail-heavy fourth quarter. Gross numbers are still small, of course, but it was surprising see that Pinterest generated more than double the traffic than Twitter.
That’s a big deal, indeed. Pinterest even had highest average order value among social media referrers ($80.54). Unfortunately, the rate of conversions after a visitor has been directed from Pinterest to an eCommerce site shows ample room for improvement. But the signs are still positive that the full potential of social commerce will one day be realized.
“Given the extreme stickiness of social networks (especially Facebook and Pinterest), it is indeed possible that part of the issue with social commerce is one of session interruption, whereby consumers don’t want to leave the visceral comforts of their social network by clicking a link and going shopping online, but would rather store the awareness of the deal in their noggin and visit the website later, when they are less ensconced in social media bliss,” the report reads. “This, of course, would culminate in a website visit from the direct source, with no credit accrued to the ignition source of social. Certainly on its face, the data in this EQ looks a little gloomy for social media as a revenue producer. Maybe that’s so. But I refuse to believe that all of our posting, sharing, and liking isn’t at least contributing to ecommerce traffic and sales, considering that we spend more time on social media than on web browsing and email combined.”
To read the complete report, click here.
