ZAPPOS / PINPOINTING
10 September 2012
E-tailer crunches Pinterest data to suggest tailored purchase recommendations
- Brand
- Zappos
- Media Type
- Online
- Social Media
- Product Category
- Leisure & Entertainment
- Retail / Online Retail
- Source
- News
- Tags
- Pintrest
- online
- social
- image sharing
- data
USA-based online shopping site Zappos has launched a Pinterest-based web service that translates users' pins into available product options from the retailer.
The PinPointing site analyses the pins on a user's Pinterest board and from this information produces product recommendations that relate to the pinned image and its description. This service has been designed to mirror that of a personal shopper, producing a wish-list of Zappos products. Users can also use the site to search for boards created by friends, celebrities or brands.
Director of Zappos Labs, Will Young, explains PinPointing's potential: 'Social shopping is a total buzzword that people throw around, but I don't think any big brands have cracked it. 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.'
Contagious Insight
This is perhaps one of the most interesting ways we have seen a brand use Pinterest so far, plus one of the most direct ways to pair social media activity with straight sales, which begs the question - is this the commercial future of Pinterest?
However, the execution isn't necessarily as strong as the concept. In practice, it appears that PinPointing is scraping the text people have used to caption their pinned images to find related products. While this works fine for some captions, Pinterest users rarely use literal descriptions to tag images on their boards - something which results in rather curious results returned in some cases. Potentially further development could bring in meta data from the image files themselves but that too isn't necessarily more reliable. We'll keep an eye on how this idea develops and if Zappos releases any results connected to the campaign.
This story originally appeared on Contagious Feed. Contagious Feed is our bespoke trends, inspiration, insight and analysis service, providing daily innovative marketing intelligence across a comprehensive range of sectors to brands and agencies across the world. For more information about Contagious Feed contact sales@contagiousmagazine.com
The PinPointing site analyses the pins on a user's Pinterest board and from this information produces product recommendations that relate to the pinned image and its description. This service has been designed to mirror that of a personal shopper, producing a wish-list of Zappos products. Users can also use the site to search for boards created by friends, celebrities or brands.
Director of Zappos Labs, Will Young, explains PinPointing's potential: 'Social shopping is a total buzzword that people throw around, but I don't think any big brands have cracked it. 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.'
Contagious Insight
This is perhaps one of the most interesting ways we have seen a brand use Pinterest so far, plus one of the most direct ways to pair social media activity with straight sales, which begs the question - is this the commercial future of Pinterest?
However, the execution isn't necessarily as strong as the concept. In practice, it appears that PinPointing is scraping the text people have used to caption their pinned images to find related products. While this works fine for some captions, Pinterest users rarely use literal descriptions to tag images on their boards - something which results in rather curious results returned in some cases. Potentially further development could bring in meta data from the image files themselves but that too isn't necessarily more reliable. We'll keep an eye on how this idea develops and if Zappos releases any results connected to the campaign.
This story originally appeared on Contagious Feed. Contagious Feed is our bespoke trends, inspiration, insight and analysis service, providing daily innovative marketing intelligence across a comprehensive range of sectors to brands and agencies across the world. For more information about Contagious Feed contact sales@contagiousmagazine.com
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