Pinterest has announced that it’s making its Shopping Ads available to more businesses as it moves into the next phase of its monetization efforts.

As explained by Pinterest:

“Today we’re announcing our next shopping milestone. We’re expanding Shopping Ads from a couple dozen retailers, to hundreds of businesses. With Shopping Ads, businesses can seamlessly turn their product catalog into visual, actionable ads – and since Shopping Ads pull automatically from an existing product feed, they’re especially useful for brands that want to scale their Pinterest advertising.”

Shopping Ads - which, as noted above, have been in testing with selected retailers for the last few months - enable businesses to automatically create Promoted Pins from their existing product feed, making it easier for brands to keep their Pinterest listings up to date and capitalize on available opportunities.

Pinterest is also developing new ways to display Shopping Ads – the above example shows a product from multiple angles, while another test unit pulls a mix of ‘product shots and lifestyle imagery’, enabling Pinners to see how the product/s could fit into their lives.

And further expanding their ad tools, they’ve also announced that their ‘Shop the Look’ Pins are being made available to brands in France, Germany, Japan and the UK.

Shop the Look Pins function in a similar way to Instagram’s Shopping Tags, which are also being slowly developed and rolled out. The expansion of Shop the Look will give Pinterest advertisers more ways to better showcase their content, and add to the shopping potential of the platform, which has been slowly shifting away from its social network roots.

If you’ve not considered the potential of Pinterest for your business, it may well be worth re-visiting, particularly in light of Facebook’s more recent algorithm shifts. While Pinterest only has 200 million monthly active users (still a lot, but comparatively much smaller than Facebook), those who do use it come to the platform with high purchase intent.

A recent report showed that 90% of weekly Pinners use the platform to make purchase decisions, and 78% of Pinners say content from brands on the platform is helpful.

These new ad options expand on the available opportunities.

If you want to sign up to be amongst the first brands to get access to Pinterest’s Shopping Ads, you can do so here.