Pinterest doesn't plan on taking a cut of retailers transactions with Buyable Pins, will instead make money promoting the pins
Pinterest Brings E-Commerce to Social Scrapbooking With ‘Buy It’ Button — Pinterest, the online social scrapbooking service, has long claimed to help people discover new things in the real world.
Context & Ripple Effects
The announcement lands the same day as Buyable Pins' US launch: Pinterest lets iPhone and iPad users in the US buy pinned products without leaving the app, and is telling retailers upfront it will not charge a transaction fee — revenue comes from promoting those pins instead. A month later the feature ships broadly with a "Shop our picks" category, and BuzzFeed's inside look at the e-commerce platform frames recommendations and easier mobile shopping as the real product.
The strategic logic is that Pinterest sits at the top of the purchasing funnel, where discovery happens before a merchant's checkout ever does — a positioning Digiday revisits in 2019 alongside the buy button's struggles and visual search. Declining a take rate keeps merchants from seeing Pinterest as a channel competitor and preserves the ad-based model the company had already committed to.
First-order effects
- US merchants using Buyable Pins pay nothing per transaction, lowering the barrier to putting their catalogs inside the app while Pinterest converts that inventory into promoted-pin ad slots it sells directly.
Second-order effects
- Every completed in-app purchase generates conversion data that makes Pinterest's promoted pins measurably more effective, pulling retail ad budgets toward the platform and giving advertisers proof the pins drive sales, not just saves.
Third-order effects
- If the no-take-rate stance holds, commerce platforms split into two models — ad-funded intent capture versus payment-fee infrastructure — and Pinterest's later move to let creators earn commissions by tagging products in Idea Pins shows the company eventually monetized transactions indirectly anyway, through affiliate-style incentives layered on top of its ads business.
The trend: Social platforms with high commercial-intent traffic are monetizing shopping behavior through advertising rather than payment take rates, with Pinterest as the clearest early test case.