Technode published an informative blog item this week on the growing popularity of Pinterest-style e-commerce sites in China. I was fairly clueless about this social-media phenomenon until distaff colleagues started frittering away their office lunch breaks cooing over the Pinterest website, a kind of electronic corkboard where members “pin” photos and images of random stuff that interests them and share these images with like-minded online BFFs.
This may not sound cutting edge, but what’s gotten people excited is the way Pinterest has been enthusiastically adopted by free-spending females as a visually-rich way to swap ideas for accessorizing their lives, zapping photos of shoes, home d√ɬ©cor and much else to each other—often along with links to shopping websites where the items can be purchased.
You can see why this gets online marketing types all tingly. User engagement is high on pinboard sites, and many users are there not to share photos of the kids or the vacation, they are there to display what they just bought or are thinking of buying. In other words, Pinterest and a handful of Chinese copycats represent a much purer consumer-referral play than Facebook’s amorphous Like button. As Technode blogger Ben Chiang put it, the pinboard website is the SNS “business model nearest to the money,” since operators can get paid every time a pinboard post generates a referral or (even better) a sale on a shopping website. It’s worth noting that according to Chiang, Pinterest drives more referral traffic than Google+, LinkedIn and YouTube combined.
Chiang’s blog names Meilishuo and Mogujie as China’s two most successful pinboard websites, but the game is just beginning. Taobao also has a stake in the ground with a service called WOW. China’s largest e-shopping platform is benefitting in other ways. On the mainland most referral links go to individual vendors on Taobao rather than to the shopping websites of major retailers. More than 80% of Meilishuo and Mogujie revenues come from Taobao’s affiliate program, Chiang writes.
