How to optimize your product feed for more sales

December 17, 2021Jet Cessant

If you've got products to sell, the more eyes that see them the better. When people are looking for what to purchase next, sharing your product catalog on Pinterest is an easy way to help you find new customers. 

People love to shop on Pinterest. In fact, weekly Pinners are 7x more likely to say Pinterest is the most influential platform in their purchase journey, compared to social media platforms.1

With 444 million2 consumers looking for their next great discovery on Pinterest, it’s important to make sure they find your products. A great way to do this is sharing your product feed—one that’s complete, up to date and detailed. Or in other words, optimized.

All about product feeds

First things first: What’s a product feed? Simply put, it’s a file that lists your products and their features. It’s usually a spreadsheet. Each row includes a product, and each column has the details or “metadata” about that product. This includes things like the title, description and price.

Some details are required and others are optional. But, the more information you give shoppers, the more likely they are to find what they’re looking for.

This is where feed optimization—or organizing and improving your feed to maximize results—comes in.

Pin of a Black woman in profile with naturally textured hair, wearing a blue dress and white sneakers, balancing forward on one foot on a sidewalk. Beige wall in background.

Required feed attributes

Pin of a Black woman in profile with naturally textured hair, wearing a blue dress and white sneakers. Text callouts showing optional feed attributes: bestseller, medium, adult, free shipping, apparel, female, dresses, linen.

Optional feed attributes

Set up your product catalog

To start, all you need is a product catalog. If you already have one, great! If not, create a spreadsheet that lists your products and their seven required attributes: a unique ID, title, description, product URL, image URL, price and availability. You can download our product feed worksheet to make things easier. 

If you’re using a third-party platform to manage your feed, we’ve got you covered. Pinterest integrates with popular eCommerce solutions like Shopify, Feedomonics and others. Once you submit your feed through those platforms, your catalog will automatically be reviewed by our team for compliance with our merchant guidelines.3

After your feed is all set, you’ll connect it to Pinterest. By clicking “publish,” you’ll transform your product feed into shoppable content.

Pinterest collections ad of a white cup and saucer at top. At bottom, the words shop this collection. American Modern Cup and saucer, priced 19.99. Brown wooden hand-crank nut cracker, priced 26.99.

Make your products discoverable

By connecting your feed, you publish your catalog as product Pins on Pinterest. Product Pins contain visuals and information to get shoppers excited to try things. From simple images to lively videos, people love engaging with them. Remember those great details you included in your spreadsheet? Product Pins bring them to life, and aim to lead shoppers to your website for purchase.

When someone searches for an item on Pinterest, product Pins appear organically across shopping features like the Shop tab.

Advertise your products on Pinterest

Ready to get started? You can download our Advanced Feed Optimization Guide below to learn how to ring up sales by putting your product catalog on Pinterest.

Here’s just a few of the things you’ll learn: 

  • What to include in your feed to help get more clicks, sales and customers

  • What makes a good product description

  • How your ad copy can build trust

Brands that optimized their product feed with details like ratings and free shipping, for example, saw over double the amount of checkouts than those that didn’t.4 Now's the time to make shopping on Pinterest work for your brand. Go get those sales!