5 Required steps for Shopify Pinterest catalog | Actionable

Before you get started and set up your Shopify Pinterest catalog, make sure to complete Pinterest requirements. 

What is Catalog? A catalog is a file where all your products are listed appropriately with all necessary information. Every eCommerce store that wants to sell its products on Pinterest should have the following things.

Shopify Pinterest Catalog

1) Pinterest Business Account.

2) Claim your website on Pinterest.

3) Website must have shipping policy, refund policy, and contact details (Pinterest Merchant Guidelines).

4) Must have a Data Source( File containing a list of all products and attributes).

5) Should have Data Source Hosting.

The good thing about Shopify is they have done partnership with Pinterest last year 2020 and that made possible Shopify Pinterest Catalog. Here you can find the list of the eCommerce Platforms that are by Pinterest to publish their products on Pinterest feed.

• Shopify
• Square
• Lengow
• ChannelAdvisor
• GoDataFeed
• Feedonomics
• Productsup

If you don’t have any catalog on your website then either you can run aids or do organically to sell your products on Pinterest.

Let me take you into more detail about Data Source

What is Data Source? It’s a file that contains a list of your products called Product feed, Data Feed, or Product Catalog). The list of your products is structured in a specific way with corresponding attributes in the feed file. This file also helps to dynamically create pins from your Products in your Pinterest Business Account.

How does a Data Source Work?

When you submit a Date Source file to Pinterest. Pinterest validates the Shopify Pinterest catalog. After Validation, Pinterest creates products pins in your profile after passing its validation process.

Maintain a Data Source

For your information, maintaining a data source is a process and it will continue with time. Because its needs to be updated with the information that is required. Pinterest ingests your Data Source and checks daily to ensure there is no error in your Pinterest Shopify Catalog.

It’s important to remove the errors from your product feed so that Pinterest validates it and ensures the product is shown in a buyable pin.

• Keep in mind that data source ingests by Pinterest once in 24 hours.
• Make sure that your data source should be host on HTTP/HTTPS or FTP/SFTP and downloadable.
• Pinterest can process up to 20 million products in one account.

Claim your Website

Go to your Pinterest account setting and claim your Domain. All product URLs in your catalog must same as the registered claim store in your Pinterest Business account. For your information, a business can register many domains for its business but you can claim per domain one Pinterest account.

Pinterest Tag setup

Pinterest Tags you can install manually or through a Shopify Pinterest app. It depends on your e-commerce platform. Pinterest tags install on your website to get some insights like people’s actions on your website.

• For shopping use the following Pinterest tags: PageVisits, AddToCart, and Checkouts.
• Pinterest Tag passes event data for Product id for PageVisit, AddToCart, and Checkouts as an attribute.
• Product_id Must match the “item_group_id”.
• Must product_id pass under a line item.
• For passing back product IDs you must have 100,000 AddtoCart and PageViews in the last 7 days.

Up to 20 catalogs you can add to your account for better advertisement in different markets, languages, and currencies.

Hosting Requirements for Catalog Data Source

HTTP/HTTPS server required or FTP/SFTP server with the direct download link. The data source must be accessible by a user agent.

Data Source Format

• Tab separated (tsv) (Download TSV example(opens in a new window))
• Comma separated (csv) (Download CSV example)
• XML (RSS 2.0) (Download XML example)

Required and Optional Fields

7 things are required in this field and it must be properly formatted If not whole feed will not ingest. Following are the required fields

• id
• title
• description
• link
• image_link
• price
• availability

There are optional fields in Pinterest Data Source. So providing more information will lead you to more targeted people.