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Pinterest Says Search With Your Camera

A shop tab on the Lens results will change the way Pinterest users shop. Clicking it brings up shoppable product Pins in stock from merchants. There’s strength in images.

Pinterest launched the feature to let users click the camera in the search bar on Pinterest, snap or upload a photo, and see a Shop tab with a feed of shoppable Pins. It’s based on in-stock products that Pinterest identifies in the image.

There are about three times as many visual searches using the Pinterest camera today compared with last year, and every Product Pin links directly to the checkout page on the retailer's site.

The camera was initially intended to help shoppers find matching products. Now Pinterest has made the tab shoppable.

Marketers should understand that about half of the shoppers using the tool are looking for items in fashion and home decorating categories. These include shirts, tops, dresses, shoes, jackets, vases, mirrors, rugs, plans and throw pillows.

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In the past few months, Pinterest has been a 30% increase in searches for at-home beauty products such as press on nails, while searches related to sweatpants fell 12% from February to April. Meanwhile, home office-related searches are the highest, growing 2.7-times from February to April.

Searches related to outside activities and accessories such as backyard furniture rise each spring, but Pinterest saw record highs for these searches in May -- three times greater than last year.

Searches for grocery shopping lists, which doubled this April compared to February, track the events around COVID-19.

The debut of the Shop tab follows a partnership with Shopify aimed at making it easier for small businesses to upload their product catalogs to Pinterest.

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