Pics on Pinterest Can Lead to New Shoes

You think only your friends are checking out your social-media postings? Think again. Checking out what the hoi polloi is putting up on social-media sites is a window into what the American culture is thinking a feeling. That’s a goldmine for the thinking person’s marketer.

One of those marketers apparently works at Amazon.com Inc.’s Zappos. The site, known for its shoe sales, has partnered with Pinterest to create a new site called PinPointing that will suggest Zappos products to consumers based on their Pinterest posts.

“Social shopping is a total buzzword that people throw around, but I don’t think any big brands have cracked it,” said Will Young, director of Zappos Labs, according to Bloomberg.com. “When we talk to people and ask what they think is the best social-shopping experience, they say Pinterest, and it’s not even a retailer.”

And thus, a partnership was born.

Forbes points out that there are lots of good stats to back up getting involved with social shopping, such as that 83 percent of consumers have been found to be likely to visit a website recommended by a friend on Facebook, 90% of online consumers trust recommendations from people they know, and 70 percent of Americans looked at reviews before taking the next step to purchase.

“Signs show that social shopping will play a big role in driving the next innovation in online retail, as well as companies’ sales,” the site notes.

Such sites as Etsy and the Facebook-owned Karma are already in the game, offering gift-giving suggestions to users based on the social-media postings of their friends.

Now Zappos is pinning its hopes for some success in the field with Pinterest, which “has seen a surge in user growth since it was introduced in 2010, and had 11.7 million visitors as of January,” according to Bloomberg. Still, Zappos pulls in plenty of dough from other social-media sources as well. Bloomberg reports that when Zappos consumers post their purchases to Twitter, it can often result in further sales. The average, according to the site, is $33.66 an order.

“Even if a person has 100,000 followers on Pinterest and she pins something to a board called ‘Stuff I Love,’ that’s not as big a deal as an endorsement tweeted to 10,000 followers,” Young said, according to Bloomberg.

Still, Zappos won’t say no to money no matter how it comes in, so it’s covering its bases with PinPointing and hoping to hit a grand slam.