5 Tips to Grow Your E-commerce Business Through Pinterest

Pinterest had roughly 250 million monthly users when this guide was originally written. It closed its most recent quarter at 640 million, its eleventh consecutive quarter of double-digit user growth, and it’s no longer just a mood board with shopping bolted on, it’s now an AI-powered visual search engine built around purchase intent.

85% of weekly Pinterest users have made a purchase based on a Pin from a brand, and Pinterest shoppers spend 80% more per month than users on other platforms, with 40% larger basket sizes on average, according to 2026 research from Charle Agency. The original five tips in this guide, optimize your business profile, promote your pins, use discount codes, organize by board, and use analytics to improve performance, remain exactly the right framework. Here’s what’s changed inside each one.

1. Optimize your business profile: unchanged

Creating a free business account, claiming your website, and activating Rich Pins remain exactly the right first steps, and the process this guide originally walked through, adding the HTML verification tag, enabling the Rich Pins Validator, still works the same way in 2026. This foundational setup hasn’t changed at all.

2. Promote your pins: unchanged mechanically, now running on Pinterest’s own AI

The “Promote” feature, setting a budget and running a traffic campaign on a specific pin, remains available and works essentially as this guide described. What’s changed since 2019 is what happens behind the scenes: Pinterest restructured much of the company around AI in January 2026, shifting resources toward AI-powered recommendation and discovery systems that now decide which pins get shown to which users, a considerably more sophisticated targeting layer than existed when this guide was first written.

3. Use discount codes: unchanged

Adding a discount code as a text overlay or within a pin’s description remains an effective, low-effort way to lift engagement and conversion. Nothing about this tactic has changed since 2019.

4. Leverage different boards for different products: unchanged

Segmenting products into category-specific and seasonal boards remains exactly the right organizational approach, and it pairs increasingly well with Pinterest’s growing search and discovery emphasis: 96% of top searches on the platform are unbranded, according to 2026 data, meaning well-organized, clearly labeled boards continue to give smaller brands a genuine chance at being discovered by name-agnostic searchers.

A correction worth making: “Buyable Pins” as a standalone feature is gone

The original guide’s closing note, that buyable pins letting users purchase without leaving Pinterest were only available to American users, described a feature that Pinterest has since folded into its broader Product Pins and catalog-based shopping system rather than keeping as a separate standalone product. Current shopping tools, including catalog-integrated Product Pins, shoppable Idea Pins, and the AR-powered Pinterest Lens “Try On” feature, are available considerably more broadly than the original narrow Buyable Pins rollout ever was, and Try On users are 5 times more likely to purchase, according to Pinterest’s own 2025 AR report.

5. Use Pinterest Analytics to improve performance: unchanged, now with AI-driven distribution to factor in

The original advice, create multiple versions of an underperforming pin with different images and descriptions, then double down on the strongest performer, remains exactly the right testing discipline. It’s worth pairing this with an understanding that Pinterest’s January 2026 shift toward AI-driven recommendations means the algorithm is now weighing signals beyond simple engagement counts, making regular analytics review even more important for understanding what’s actually resonating with the AI-curated discovery feed versus your own board followers. For the fuller picture of where Pinterest fits into a broader paid and organic strategy, it’s worth reviewing this alongside your digital marketing plan as a whole.

Wrapping up

The core argument this guide made in 2019, that Pinterest’s visual, high-purchase-intent format makes it a uniquely valuable channel for e-commerce merchants, has held up completely and arguably strengthened. The audience has more than doubled, the shopping features have consolidated into something more capable, and the platform’s own infrastructure has shifted toward AI-powered discovery, all pointing in the same direction this guide originally argued: if you’re not tapping into Pinterest as an e-commerce merchant, you’re leaving a genuinely large and high-intent audience on the table.

Frequently asked questions