Pinterest just picked up a cool $100 million in funding led by Japanese online shopping giant Rakuten, placing its value in the region of $1.5 billion. That’s huge–bigger than Instagram–but perhaps justified if the Pinteresting effect is reverberating through e-commerce sites. Here’s some proof that it is: Shopify, which supplies the e-commerce back end to 25,000 online stores, asked its partners whether Pinterest users are buying anything. The results are impressive.
Pinterest is now the third biggest referral source to Shopify’s partner sites after Facebook, and on par with Twitter.
Pinterest users shop big–the average price tag is double that of a buy from a Facebook user.
Visits from the social network have jumped 145% since January this year, and, as a source of revenue for stores Pinterest now contributes 17% of social media traffic–up from 1% in Q2 last year.
[Image: Shopify]
