The Future of Pinterest

If you think that publishing is going through an evolution then photography is experiencing a revolution. There are happy snappers everywhere. The smart phone with the inbuilt high definition camera is turning everyone into a photographer. Add some software technology with Instagram filters and an ordinary photo is becoming a piece of art. Sites such as Pinterest are also allowing us to share this visual art form in glorious color, creativity and ease just by pinning images from the screen with a couple of clicks. Competitors such as The Fancy.com are  taking these concepts of visual pinning even further into the realm of social commerce and have announced that they have reached a whopping one million users already.

The Rise of Social Mobile Commerce

The Fancy has introduced a few new features into its mobile app offering, most notably the ability to buy products (they are reportedly making an average of $50,000 each week from users snapping up the products they fancy). Up until now users could only collect images they fancied, but now you can buy them with one-click purchasing directly from your iPhone or iPad. This revolution is changing the way businesses perform commerce online.  Online vendors are realizing that the habits and practices of  buyers online are changing rapidly and that tablet and smartphone users are much more likely to impulse buy with the convenience of one click shopping.

Pinterest has the Numbers

When it is all said and done, Pinterest still has the mind share and the numbers (currently at over 20 million users) but it certainly needs to keep developing its platform rapidly. Online boutiques such as Boticca have turned their product categories into boards on Pinterest and are generating up to 10% of their sales from clicks from Pinterest. There is a bigger story here and the future of Pinterest is going to be the same.