Amazon And CVS Leverage Pinterest’s Secret Santa Toolset

In an attempt to make it even easier to get the right gift this holiday shopping season, Pinterest has announced news of a personalized Secret Santa gifting tool designed to help customers get inspired to buy custom Christmas gifts for their friends and family.

The new tool has managed to attract some high-profile partners for the launch, including Amazon, Bed Bath & Beyond, Coca-Cola, CVS and Universal Pictures. The tool works by leveraging the Pinterest API to create customized idea boards for friends and family based on the types of things they are pinning themselves.

But what if your friends and family aren’t on Pinterest? Not a problem: Users can create boards for persona types — travelers, pet lovers, etc. — to get an idea of what people with similar interests are coveting this holiday shopping season.

The move allows Pinterest — once thought of as the most natural home for social commerce and marketing — to wrest back that opportunity from Facebook, which has since become social commerce’s top ranking power player.

An Open Influence study from last month found that Facebook was far and away the leader among platforms for last-clicked social commerce, with about 48 percent of users noting they’d made their last purchase via Facebook. A mere 2 percent chose Pinterest.

The Pinterest Secret Santa tool, however, is a nice chance for Pinterest to push contextual commerce on consumers already engaged and pinning. And Pinterest users are a valuable group to tap, as they are 35 percent more likely to buy gifts than non-pinners. They also spend more — 45 percent more when they convert.

The gift recommendation tool plays well with Pinterest’s other moves to up its commerce game of late, including its new visual search feature “Lens Your Look.”  Lens Your Look allows consumers to snap a photo of their current wardrobe and then get style recommendations. The social platform has also rolled out Pincodes, a similar tool to QR codes, which takes users to branded Pinterest boards after using smartphone cameras to scan the codes.