You can now shop through Pinterest 🛍️🛒

Aware that sellers are increasingly putting their products online through Pinterest, the company launched a new feature today: a tab dedicated to selling directly through the site.

Now you simply click the camera icon in the search bar to open the "Shop" option and see all the results that visually match your search. You can do this with a photograph taken in the real world or even a screenshot.

In short: click the camera in your usual search bar, upload a photograph of a product or take one there and then, and see the results, showing where you can buy what you want.

You can also see stock availability and the price of the product you want, along with checkout links.

This could be a great opportunity for businesses to extend their reach even further! Consumers increasingly look for inspiration on sites like this, and Pinterest is undoubtedly the most widely used for this purpose.

Although the camera was originally designed to help shoppers find products matching things they saw in physical shops while out and about, Pinterest suggests that you can now use this new feature without even leaving home.

Read the company's full announcement here.

Imagine you need to replace your trainers or a broken piece of living room furniture: upload a photograph straight from your phone's photo album and see the matches (in other words, which shops sell those products, how many are available and the price).

The endlessly inspiring company says there are now three times as many visual searches using this feature as there were in 2019. These figures suggest that people are becoming more familiar with using their phone cameras to shop online.

But they also mean that Pinterest's work over recent months really has paid off. In the last six months, for example, the company doubled the number of attributes it detects in women's fashion, including colours, patterns, fabrics, styles, lengths, textures, brands, necklines, heel height, occasion, style and season.

The company says the accuracy of fashion product matching has also increased by 50% compared with last year.

This new way of searching follows the partnership with Shopify, which made uploading catalogues to Pinterest easier, particularly for small businesses. These small businesses already represent more than 350 million users.

There is another new feature that has not yet reached Portugal: shopping spotlights, which are simply trends curated by influencers and publishers.

This new tab in Lens also gives Pinterest another way to compete with Google, which recently began displaying free merchant listings more prominently than paid adverts.

The feature also challenges Instagram, which has seen steady growth in its online shopping service, connecting shoppers with products they see in photos and allowing them to buy without leaving the app. This feature was announced simultaneously for Instagram and Facebook, enabling direct purchases.

Together, these efforts point towards a new trend in how consumers want to shop. Rather than scrolling through long product lists, shoppers want to be inspired by real photographs and images before completing a purchase.

The result of this highly image-led approach to buying and selling is an experience that increasingly resembles walking around a shop and finding products displayed to catch your eye.