Pinterest is about to make shopaholics very happy. Today, the social networking site announced that they will now be monitoring price drops on products and notifying users of this via email.
Back in May, Pinterest introduced what they called “more useful pins.” Basically, Pinterest added more information to certain types of pins – recipes, movie reviews, and most relevant to today’s announcement – product prices and availability.
Pinterest will now watch those items with price information and they’ll start sending out emails to those who have pinned the item when the price drops. The emails will read something like “Good News! Today, your heavy pendant light pin from Room 68 is 15% less.”
“You don’t have to do anything to get notified. Just keep pinning the things you’re into, and leave the price watching to us. We’ll try to keep your inbox clutter-free by grouping these notifications into a single email, but you can always adjust your settings if you need to.There are already tens of millions of pins with price details on them, so it’s easy for you to find something that doesn’t break the bank,” says Pinterest engineer Jeffrey Warren.
Some true online shopping deal hawks may know that there are already a bunch of services that allow you to track price fluctuations all over the web and a few online shopping sites that already have price drop notifications built in. The point is, Pinterest isn’t the first the do this – but it’s the biggest. And this has the potential to make the site even more important for online retailers.
If you’re a business, Pinterest says that there are numerous advantages to using product pins. They “get higher click-through rates than regular pins, make your brand more visible because your logo’s on the pin, are more likely to appear in a category feed, like Men’s Fashion or Gifts and include automatically updated details, like price changes,” according to Pinterest’s Kevin Knight.
If you’re a business looking to get started, you can visit Pinterest’s developer site.