Pinterest Pins of Your Products With No Price

Gift ideas saved without a price

As the holidays approach, shoppers save gift ideas on Pinterest: a teapot, a scarf, a box of chocolates, pinned to a board for later.

When one of your products is pinned, the pin shows the photograph, a description the pinner may have typed, and a link to your page. Nothing says what it costs or whether it is in stock.

A pinner comparing saved gifts later has to click through each one to find out, and the pin says nothing about your shop until they do.

What Rich Pins add

Rich Pins carry extra details taken from the page they link to. Product Rich Pins show the current price, whether the item is available, and where to buy it.

The details come from your page, not from the pinner, so they are right when your page is right. Pinterest reads the page again from time to time and updates the pin.

Once your site is approved, the details appear on every pin of your product pages, whoever made it.

What the markup involves

Pinterest reads a few lines in each product page's code that state the facts in a standard form, Open Graph or Schema.org markup:

• The product name, as it appears on the page.
• The price, as a plain number.
• The currency, so a price in Canadian dollars is shown as one.
• Availability, in stock or not.
• The page's own address, so every pin points to one place.

Some shop platforms add this markup to product templates already. On others, the developer adds it once to the product template, and every product page carries it from then on.

Validation and approval

With the markup in place, enter one product page's address in Pinterest's Rich Pins validator. It shows what Pinterest found and flags anything missing.

If the page passes, apply from the same screen. Pinterest reviews the application and replies by email, and approval covers the whole site rather than one page.

Until approval, the markup does nothing visible. Leave it in place; a later template change that removes it turns the details off again without warning.

Why sliders and tiny images pin badly

When a shopper pins from your page, Pinterest offers the images it finds there. The image they choose becomes the pin.

Images set as backgrounds by the stylesheet, as many sliders and banners are, are not offered at all. Images a slider loads later may be missed.

Very small images are skipped, or look blurred once enlarged in a pin. A product page whose only large picture is a banner gets pinned as a banner.

Give every product page a single large, clear photograph of the product itself, placed as an ordinary image near the top. That is what a pinner should find first.

Images that hold up in a pin

Pins are shown in narrow columns, so tall and square images keep their detail, while wide ones shrink to a thin strip.

A plain background, the product filling most of the frame, and no text laid over the photograph all survive the reduction.

Logos, icons and payment badges can be marked in the code so the Pin It button skips them, leaving only the product photographs to choose from.

Photograph each product the same way, on the same background, so that a board full of your pins reads as one shop.

A worked example

A tea importer sells loose-leaf teas, tins and teapots online, with gift sets that sell most strongly from November to January.

Its products were pinned regularly, but the pins showed only a photograph and a link. Some pointed to product pages from an older site that no longer existed.

The product pages showed a price but carried no markup, and the only large image on each was a slider of serving photographs set as backgrounds.

The developer added Open Graph product markup to the product template, placed one large photograph of each tea or teapot as an ordinary image, and redirected each old product address to its current page.

After validation and approval, pins of the importer's products carried the price, availability and shop name, and pins from the old site reached the right product again.

Keeping prices on pins honest

The pin shows whatever the markup says. If a sale price appears on the page but the markup still carries the regular price, pinners see the wrong figure.

Have the markup take its price from the same place as the visible price, so the two cannot drift apart.

When a product is discontinued, keep its page with a note and links to alternatives, or redirect it to the closest product. A pin that ends at an error page wastes the pinner's interest.

Checking pins of your own products

Pinterest keeps a page for every site listing the pins that link to it, at pinterest.com/source/ followed by your domain.

Look through it every few weeks. Check that recent pins show the price and stock, that the price is current, and that no pins lead to missing pages.

The same page shows which products shoppers save, which is worth knowing before deciding what to photograph next.

The counter-case

A business that sells services, or sells products only in its shop, has little to gain from Product Rich Pins. Its pins have no price to show.

And a shop whose products are rarely pinned may find a few pins a month do not justify much work.

But where the markup is a single change to one template, made by whoever maintains the shop, it puts the price on every pin of every product from then on.

Getting prices onto your pins

1. Look up pins of your site on Pinterest.
2. Check a product page for product markup.
3. Add the markup to the product template.
4. Validate one page and apply for Rich Pins.
5. Give each product one large, ordinary image.
6. Redirect old product addresses that pins still use.
7. Match the markup price to the visible price.

Step four has a wait built into it. Pinterest's review takes time, so applying in October leaves room before shoppers start saving gift ideas in earnest.

Product details kept on a social platform, and what to do when the platform removes the place that held them, are covered in LinkedIn retires the Products tab.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.