How To Generate A WooCommerce Pinterest Product Feed

Pinterest is one of the leading social media platforms of 2021. If we further classify this, then we will find that it is the largest social network for ideas. When it comes to ideas, inspiration, and awesome collections, Pinterest has no match.

Currently, Pinterest has more than 459 million monthly active users. The rising popularity of Pinterest and its monthly active users are perfect for WooCommerce store owners to promote their products on this platform. Here we will share how you can create WooCommerce Pinterest product feeds in the most optimized way.

Pinterest, also known as the visual search engine, is dedicatedly working to ensure a better business owner platform. Pinterest visitors browse this platform with a shopping mindset and discover new products. Thus it creates a strong connection between the Pinners and business owners.

Pinners are consistently looking for inspiration, and businesses and brands transform their inspiration to reality. As a result, brands and businesses have a massive potential to reach more customers and generate more sales for their businesses. It would be best if you grabbed this opportunity for your WooCommerce store too.

Back in 2019, Pinterest launched Catalogs and Shopping Ads as a new feature for business owners. This new feature has enabled more space to shop for products with personalized recommendations for various categories like style and home decor boards. 

It also allows to create and curate browsable sections of in-stock products from a specific brand and shopping search. Additionally, the catalogs and shopping ads help create a shopping space and share them with millions of Pinterest visitors. Pinterest is ready to help your business grow with its fantastic platform. Now it comes to you to make the most of it for your business.

Setting up a Pinterest Catalog

Online shopping is getting more popular over time. Apart from flexible shopping options and other out-of-the-box features, social media also contributes to online shopping growth. Social media has a massive influence on our day-to-day life. They influence our decision and make us do things that we would not have done by ourselves. Online store owners and marketing professionals leverage this opportunity and run social media promotions to ensure their business’s best result and steady growth.

As a WooCommerce store owner, you should also leverage all the available platforms to ensure that you are not falling behind. Pinterest offers catalogs to give you the ability to create shopping space for your brand. You will have to generate product feeds and upload them to your Pinterest business account to manage a Pinterest catalog correctly.

If you do not know anything about Pinterest catalogs and product feeds, there is nothing to worry about. We will share the essential information on Pinterest catalogs and introduce you to the best WooCommerce Pinterest product feed generation tool.

First of all, let’s clear your confusion out and make things more meaningful for you. We already know about Pinterest Catalogs and what they are made for. You need to know a few things before you can set up your own WooCommerce Pinterest Catalogs.

There are few steps that you need to follow before finally setting up Pinterest Catelog.

Here is the list of the steps

• Check if Pinterest Catalogs are the right fit for you.
• You need to have a claimed website on Pinterest.
• Set up your Pinterest Tag
• The data source – connect WooCommerce to Pinterest.

Pinterest catalogs are product feed integration designed for businesses that are selling their product on their online shops or websites. You are already selling products online on your WooCommerce store. So, Pinterest catalogs are perfect for your product promotion. Find below the requirements that you need to fulfill for your Pinterest Catalogs.

• First of all, you will need a Pinterest business account.

• Secondly, you need to have a claimed website on Pinterest.

• Thirdly, your website has to meet the Merchant Guideline set by Pinterest. You will need to have an exact shipping policy, a refund policy, and contact details. You can learn more about the Merchant Guideline from this resource compiled by Pinterest.

• Moreover, you will need to have a data source or a feed file. You have the list of products that you sell on your website and other important product attributes associated with the product in this file.

• Finally, you need to host your data source or follow other methods to store the data source and share/sync it with Pinterest daily.

Pinterest currently supports some integrations that include Shopify, Square, etc. For your WooCommerce store, we will give you the best tool to connect your WooCommerce store to Pinterest.

An overview of Pinterest data source

The Pinterest catalog data source can be denoted with many names. You will find that they are also known as a product catalog, product feed, or data feed. The data source is a file that contains the list of products that you are selling on your online store and want to promote on Pinterest. 

Along with the list of products, essential product attributes are also added with the data source in a structured way supported by Pinterest. Pinterest will process your file daily to create product pins for you dynamically.

When you submit a data source to Pinterest, you need to provide them a source URL. Pinterest will access your data from this URL. First of all, they will validate the data from the source that you have provided. Secondly, they will create a product pin for all the items that pass their validation process.

Pinterest has specific requirements for the data source that you provide them. If you fail to follow the requirement, Pinterest will not create product pins from your data source. You can learn more about Pinterest data source requirements from here.

How to maintain a data source

You need to host your data source so that it is available for Pinterest during the whole campaign period. Here you provide the latest information about your products. 

Pinterest ingests the data source daily to create pins. In addition to creating pins, Pinterest will also alert you if there is an error on the data source. You need to take immediate action to review the alert produced by Pinterest and fix the errors highlighted in the alert.

You must understand the importance of sharing the most accurate and updated information with your customers. Maintaining the data source for your WooCommerce store is simplified with CTX Feed. CTX Feed is the best WooCommerce Pinterest plugin that can help your business earn more revenue from Pinterest.

In the alerts generated by Pinterest, there are different error types. Based on the error type, there are different consequences too. Based on the error, your whole feed will not be updated. Some of the items on your feed will not be updated. 

Sometimes you need to make some adjustments to ensure the best practices suggested by Pinterest. If you are interested in learning more about error messages and troubleshooting them, you can visit this link.

Here are some crucial pieces of information that you must know:

• First of all, Pinterest ingests your data source once daily. So, it will access the feed file at a 24 hours interval. As a result, you need to ensure that the updated full data source is available for Pinterest daily. Thus it will keep your product details updated on the catalog. You can schedule data source updates for your product feed, but currently, Pinterest does not support on-demand ingestion.

• Secondly, you can host your data source on an SFTP/FTP server or also an HTTP/HTTPS direct download link. The data source must be accessible only by a user-agent and cannot require any IP or SSH key whitelisting.

• Thirdly, if you provide a direct download link, it cannot have any additional navigation for Pinterest to access the file.

• Currently, Pinterest does not provide any data source hosting facility.

• Most importantly, Pinterest can process up to 20 million products for a single account. In case you have more than 20 million products, you need to contact Pinterest.

• Finally, there is also a limit of one data source for each business account.

Claiming your website

You need to register your domain to your Pinterest business account. All the destination URLs in the data source/feed file must have a web domain registered as a claimed business account on Pinterest. 

You need to note that a Pinterest business account can claim multiple domains. Opposite to this, a domain cannot be claimed by multiple Pinterest business accounts. You can get more details on how to claim your website from this link.

Setting up the Pinterest tag

You need to set up the Pinterest tag before you prepare and share your data source with Pinterest. First of all, the Pinterest tag is a chunk of JavaScript code that you need to put on your website. This will help you gain valuable insights on the conversion and also build audiences. Moreover, you can also target the visitors on your site based on their actions.

You need to ensure that you are sending shopping-specific fields through the Pinterest tag.

Follow the steps below to set your Pinterest tags properly:

• First of all, you need to implement the tag with the following conversation types. PageVisits, AddToCart, and Checkouts.

• Secondly, the Pinterest tag needs to pass event data for product_id as an attribute for PageVisits, AddToCart, and Checkouts.

• Thirdly, the product_id must pass under a line item.

• Moreover, it would be best to use the Tag Helper Chrome extension to ensure that the product ID is successfully passing back to the product detail pages.

• On top of that, the product_id that is passed in the tag has to match the “item_group_id” or “id” provided in the data source.

• Finally, you need to have a minimum of 100000 PageVisit and AddToCart events in the last seven days passing back product IDs.

Prepare your WooCommerce Pinterest product feed with CTX Feed.

CTX Feed is the leading product feed generator and management tool for WooCommerce. It has a wide range of support for leading global and also regional merchant sites. Among the leading global merchant sites or shopping engines, Pinterest is a significant candidate. CTX Feed will allow you to quickly create a WooCommerce Pinterest product feed with its built-in template.

Feed generation is straightforward with this WooCommerce Pinterest plugin. Apart from feed generation, it also offers a professional way to manage your feed. You can schedule the update intervals to refresh the product data on the source file you have shared on Pinterest.

Product data requirement by Pinterest and CTX Feed

The built-in template offers a ready-to-go solution for you to create your feed file. You do not need to learn a lot about the various requirements. Thus it will reduce your learning curve. It also reduces lots of manual work from your daily life.

Pinterest has seven required fields for the product feed file at this moment. If you miss any of the required fields in the feed file, your entire feed will be corrupted. As a result, Pinterest will not process any data from it. Below is a list of the required fields for a Pinterest feed:

• Product ID
• Product Title
• Product Description
• Product Link
• Product Image Link
• Product Price
• Product Availability

The build-in template includes all the required and optional fields that Pinterest advises. There are different filtering options to make the WooCommerce Pinterest product feed creation a breeze for you. 

Do you need more assistance with creating the feed file? You can get a step-by-step guide on how to create a product feed with CTX Feed. Additionally, we have another resource on Pinterest Shopping Ads that might be helpful for your Pinterest venture.

You will love the ease of creating a WooCommerce Pinterest product feed with the WooCommerce Pinterest plugin known as CTX Feed. The plugin is consistently updated to add new features and give you more control over your product feeds. Visit the product page to learn about all of its powerful features.