Pinterest App Helps Small Merchants Attract Pinners

A new app from Lexity, Lexity Pinterest Report, enables merchants to understand how their products or services show up on Pinterest and potentially profit from the information.

“Pinterest is driving more traffic to our merchants than Facebook or Google ads in many cases,” said Lexity CEO Amit Kumar. “Many niche, small-business merchants have very compelling, unique products, so they tend to get picked up on Pinterest by people looking for cool things. We give you a view across all references to your product across Pinterest.”

According to comScore, Pinterest was the 61st most-visited U.S. web property in June, with 20.5 million unique visitors.

Pinterest itself is expected to open APIs to third parties soon; in the meantime, Lexity wrote its own algorithms and applies them to other Pinterest data sources that Kumar would not reveal.

The three-year-old company focuses on small businesses, connecting with online stores through their e-commerce platforms to automatically generate relevant keywords, track the most-pinned products, identify relevant trending products, identify top competitors, and score the reputations of Pinterest users in regard to relevant information.

For example, according to Kumar, the app can tell a store that sells lingerie, “You should keep an eye on ‘pajamas.'”

Lexity Pinterest Report can differentiate between a pinner who has tons of followers but no interest in lingerie from one whose every petticoat pin gets attention – and suggest that the merchant should snuggle up to the latter.

Pinterest has emerged as a key social media tool for merchants of all sizes. In April, Amazon and eBay both added Pinterest buttons to product pages, letting users share product images and page links to Pinterest directly. Experian’s recent 2012 Digital Marketer report found that Pinterest, now the third most popular social networking site in the U.S., could help foster “meaningful connections” between retailers and consumers.

Pinterest Report supports 20 e-commerce platforms and is priced at $5 a month to appeal to Lexity’s core customer base of companies spending less than $10,000 per month on marketing. The company will soon release a pro version with a higher price tag that includes more sophisticated analytics.