Pinterest has introduced new tools to improve the shopping experience for UK customers and to help shops get discovered.

The image-sharing and social media service introduced shop from search, board and Pin options, along with Shopping Spotlights and a Shopping in Lens feature. The Product Pin Closeup feature has also been re-designed and there will now be ads in visual search and shop mode.

The features had already been introduced to the US market where, according to Pinterest, they have already been embraced.

The Pinterest Lens will allow users to visual search by using the Pinterest camera and Pins to shop for similar items.

Three of the locations within the application that receive the most traffic, Lens, the shop search tab and shopping on Pins, can now include ads.

According to Pinterest, the percentage of users who visited places to shop on Pinterest increased by more than 50% in the first half of 2020. 

There will be features introduced aimed at merchants as well. Verified merchants and Shopify users will be able to see the impact of their paid and organic content, and will be able to analyse performance. They will also be able to track their activity funnel and see page visitors, users who added to cart and purchasers. 

With the introduction of Shopping spotlights, publishers and creators will be able to create curated lists of shopping content for customers. UK publisher Stylist created a collection of products from UK businesses in collaboration with Pinterest, which (at the time of writing) had 75 pins and 1.6 million followers.

Pinterest said that, due to lockdown, many consumers will choose to shop online for Christmas. So one of its aims this year was to emulate the customer experience of shopping on the high street through curated collections and visual discovery. 

Dan Lurie, head of growth and shopping product at Pinterest, said: “We’ve heard loud and clear from our users that they want an easy way to shop on Pinterest, so we’ve launched our new shopping features to make it possible to buy anything you see on Pinterest, or get personalised recommendations for something just like it.

“We’re also introducing more places for marketers to promote Pins and showcase ads where Pinterest users love to shop most, including Lens visual search results. Pinterest enables you to discover products that you love and didn’t even know you wanted, similar to real-world shopping or browsing a catalogue with products that seem hand-picked for you.”