Pinterest Shopping: How to Sell With Catalogs and Product Pins

Pinterest shopping is the set of tools that turns a merchant’s product catalog into Pins carrying price and availability, shows them to people who are searching and planning, and hands the buyer to the merchant’s site or app to complete the purchase. It is a discovery channel with a product feed underneath, closer in mechanics to a shopping search engine than to a social storefront. Pinterest’s business site states that there is no dedicated shop tab because shopping is built into the whole experience. This guide walks through the setup, the feed, merchant requirements, shopping ads and checkout, with the decisions an e-commerce or marketing lead has to make at each step.

How does Pinterest shopping work for a merchant?

Pinterest shopping works by ingesting your product feed, creating a product Pin for each item, and distributing those Pins in search, the home feed and related results. When a shopper clicks through, the sale takes place in your store.

The flow has four stages. You upload a catalog. Pinterest reviews the merchant and creates product Pins that show title, price and stock status. Those Pins can appear organically at no cost. You may then promote them through shopping ads to reach more people or to retarget visitors.

The audience context explains why merchants bother. Pinterest reported 640 million monthly active users for the second quarter of 2026 and said in September 2026 that more than half of the searches on the platform are commercial. Its audience page also states that 96% of top searches are unbranded. A shopper typing “linen duvet cover” has not chosen a retailer, which gives a mid-sized merchant a chance it rarely gets on branded search.

The model has limits. Pinterest is a consideration-stage channel. People save products to boards and return later, so the path from first view to purchase can be long, and last-click reporting tends to understate the channel’s contribution. Plan measurement accordingly, as described in our Pinterest analytics guide.

What do you need before uploading a catalog?

You need four things: an active business account, a claimed website, the Pinterest tag on your site and a store that meets Pinterest’s merchant guidelines. Pinterest lists these as prerequisites in its help center.

• Business account. Free, and required for catalogs, analytics and ads.
• Claimed website. Verification is done with an HTML tag, an uploaded file or a DNS TXT record. Only one Pinterest account can claim a domain, and marketplace storefronts on sites such as Etsy, eBay or Amazon cannot be claimed.
• Pinterest tag. Needed for conversion measurement, retargeting audiences and eligibility for merchant programs. Add the API for Conversions alongside it if you can.
• Merchant guidelines. Your site must present accessible contact details, a shipping policy and a refund policy. Pinterest can remove products or accounts that fall short.

Merchants on major commerce platforms can shorten the process. Pinterest’s May 2025 guidance for merchants names integrations with Shopify, WooCommerce, Adobe Commerce and Salesforce Commerce Cloud, which can connect the catalog and tracking without custom development. Stores on other systems can host a feed file or use the Pinterest API.

Before starting, decide who owns the feed. In many companies the feed built for other shopping channels sits with e-commerce or a feed-management agency, while Pinterest sits with social. Agree on a single owner for product data and a named contact for Pinterest issues, since most problems that surface in ads turn out to be feed problems.

How do you build a product feed that Pinterest accepts?

Build a feed in TSV, CSV or XML that includes Pinterest’s required fields for every product, host it at a stable URL and let Pinterest fetch it daily. Feeds built for other shopping channels usually need only modest changes.

Beyond the required set, Pinterest supports dozens of optional fields, including brand, GTIN, color, size, gender, age group, condition, shipping, sale price and custom labels. Optional does not mean unimportant. Attributes help Pinterest match products to searches and power filters, and custom labels let you group products by margin or season for bidding.

The data source settings carry rules worth knowing in advance:

• An account can hold up to 50 data sources, which supports separate feeds by country, language and currency.
• The country or region of a data source cannot be changed after creation.
• Hosted feeds are ingested once every 24 hours.
• Manually uploaded files must be refreshed within 30 days or products stop being distributed organically. After 90 days, ad distribution stops as well.
• A single feed can hold up to 20 million products.
• If you replace a product photo, change the image URL too so Pinterest recognizes the update.

Pinterest’s official setup instructions are in its help article Before you get started with catalogs.

What are product Pins, and how do they differ from standard Pins?

Product Pins are Pins that carry live commercial data, including price, availability and product title, drawn from your catalog or from markup on your site. Standard Pins are images or videos with a link and no structured product information.

There are two ways to create them. Catalog ingestion produces a product Pin for every item in the feed and keeps it updated daily. Product rich Pins take data from Schema.org or Open Graph markup on individual pages; Pinterest’s help center says they display pricing and availability when the item is in stock and the merchant meets guidelines. For any store with more than a few products, the catalog route is the practical one.

Product Pins become more useful in combination with lifestyle content. Merchants can tag catalog products in their own scene images, so that a photo of a furnished room links to each item in it. Pinterest’s merchant guidance also describes shoppable collages, a creative catalog option and the ability to add products to boards. These features connect the inspirational content people save with the items they can buy.

From an optimization standpoint, product Pins follow the same rules as other Pins. Titles, descriptions and images determine which searches they match. Our guide to Pinterest SEO explains how the relevance systems read that text, and the wider principles in creating social content that performs apply to the lifestyle imagery around them.

What is the Verified Merchant Program, and is it worth applying?

The Verified Merchant Program is Pinterest’s vetting scheme for retailers. Approved merchants display a blue checkmark on their profile and product Pins and gain access to extra profile features. It is worth applying if you are eligible, because the requirements are things a serious merchant should have in place anyway.

Pinterest’s help center sets out criteria in four areas:

• Account. At least three months old, with a profile picture and a completed About section.
• Website. A domain at least nine months old, claimed by the account and compliant with merchant guidelines.
• Catalog. At least 75% of the catalog’s products ingested successfully.
• Conversion data. Page visit, add-to-cart and checkout events sent consistently over the previous 30 days, with checkouts carrying currency and product IDs.

Merchants who stop meeting the requirements are suspended and given 30 days to fix the problem before losing the status.

Two cautions apply. The program is not offered in every country; Pinterest’s help page shows a notice to visitors in regions where it is unavailable, so check from your own market. And the badge is a trust signal with no published guarantee of extra distribution. The stronger argument for pursuing it is that the checklist doubles as a health check: a merchant with a clean feed and complete conversion tracking will get better results from organic product Pins and from ads, badge or no badge.

How do shopping ads work on Pinterest?

Shopping ads promote products straight from your catalog. You select the Sales objective, choose product groups, set a budget and optimization goal, and Pinterest matches products to relevant people using your feed data, without the need for keyword lists.

Pinterest’s help center describes four shopping ad formats:

1. Standard shopping ads. A single image promoting one product.
2. Video shopping ads. A video clip featuring a product. If a product has both image and video, video takes priority.
3. Personalized collections ads. A large hero image or video with supporting product images beneath it.
4. Carousel shopping ads. Several images or videos to show features or multiple items.

Product groups are subsets of the catalog, defined by attributes such as category, brand or custom label. They let you bid differently on high-margin lines or exclude items that cannot bear advertising cost. Dynamic retargeting shows products to people who viewed them or left them in a cart.

Pinterest Performance+ automates most of this. For Sales campaigns it uses all products in the catalog, sets bids and targeting automatically and can generate collections and adjust images. Pinterest announced a Priority Products control on September 17, 2026, to let advertisers emphasize chosen items during promotions. Local inventory ads, introduced in September 2025, show in-stock items and prices at nearby stores for retailers with physical locations. Objectives, bidding and budgets are explained in full in our Pinterest Ads guide.

One operational detail: Pinterest notes that updating catalog images can delay ad delivery by one to two days. Avoid wholesale image changes immediately before a peak trading period.

What checkout options does Pinterest offer?

For most merchants there is one option: the shopper clicks through and buys on your website or in your app. Pinterest’s shopping page states that the platform does not run its own checkout and focuses on handing shoppers to the merchant.

That handoff can be made smoother in two ways. Direct links take the shopper to the specific product page instead of a category or home page. Mobile deep links open the product inside your own app when the shopper has it installed, which removes a login and keeps saved payment details at hand. Pinterest promotes deep links to merchants and reports large conversion gains from them; treat its figures as vendor claims and test on your own traffic.

Pinterest has experimented with purchasing inside the app. On August 15, 2022, it announced a hosted checkout for select US merchants that used Shopify and belonged to the Verified Merchant Program. We could not confirm from Pinterest’s current official pages how widely that feature is offered in October 2026, and the main shopping page describes handoff to the merchant as the model. If you run a Shopify store, look in the Pinterest app’s settings inside Shopify to see what your account is offered.

For planning purposes, assume your own checkout carries the sale. That makes landing page speed, mobile checkout design, guest checkout and visible delivery costs part of your Pinterest results. A campaign cannot outperform the page it sends people to.

How do you measure and improve shopping performance?

Measure shopping with tagged conversion events that include order value and product IDs, then improve the feed first, the creative second and bids last. Review by product group so that budget follows margin.

The minimum event set is page visit, add to cart and checkout, sent through the Pinterest tag and ideally the API for Conversions as well, with event IDs so duplicates are removed. Value-based bidding requires checkout events that carry order values. Add UTM parameters so your web analytics can identify Pinterest traffic; Pinterest offers an account-level setting that applies standard UTM parameters automatically, and it leaves alone any parameters already written into feed URLs.

A monthly improvement routine:

• Feed health. Check ingestion errors and the share of products approved. Fix disapprovals before touching campaigns.
• Coverage. Pinterest says larger feeds tend to see stronger returns, so include the full range unless margins rule items out.
• Titles and images. Rewrite weak titles and add lifestyle images for top sellers.
• Product groups. Compare return on ad spend by group and move budget toward profitable lines.
• Checkout. Review mobile conversion rate for Pinterest traffic against other sources.

Pinterest shopping should sit inside a channel plan with clear goals; our Pinterest marketing strategy guide covers that, and the Social Media Marketing Hub links to related guides. For managing feeds and campaigns across networks, see our comparison of social media management software.

Frequently Asked Questions