There is a huge commercial opportunity for Pinterest to use the 'discovery' nature of its platform given (as reinforced by the above study) that most of its users are women browsing for ideas for things to buy. It is interesting that they are not adding 'buy buttons' at this stage, and so are not following the lead of other social networks like Facebook and Twitter who are reported to be focusing on integrating a click to buy with payment details stored on the network. Generally, in the past these 'buy buttons' have tended not to work - see the famous failure of F-Commerce - because they did not make the buying process itself 'social'.

It is interesting to speculate why Pinterest is not doing this. Maybe this is because they want to focus first on just selling ad inventory like promoted pins? Alternatively maybe they think much of the browsing on Pinterest is 'top of the funnel' discovery and not likely to buy immediately? But there is a real opportunity here to make the buying process social by combining a call to action with concepts like tiered rewards, gamification and mutual targets to turn that discovery into a supercharged word of mouth campaign, or Social Customer get Customer. At Buyapowa we have learned that by combining these elements you can make your customers a powerful sales channel.