The study from Prosper Mobile Insights shows that only 13 percent of survey respondents either somewhat or strongly agree that Pinterest influences their purchasing decisions.
And although the social pin board site has gained a lot of traffic in a short period of time, receiving an average of 89 minutes of time spent on site per visitor in January alone according to comScore, it is not enough to catapult Pinterest into a top player in the mobile social shopping arena.
In fact, social shopping in general on mobile hasn't fully taken off. According to the study, approximately 85 percent of respondents claim to look up product information on their smartphones and tablets; however only 4.7 percent of these people first visit a social media site for this information. Most respondents (43.7%) use general Internet search when browsing product information on their mobile device.
"Although social shopping is not yet prominent, mobile shopping is," says Pam Goodfellow, Consumer Insights Director at BIGinsight. "General Internet searches, visiting retailer websites, and using apps to compare prices on the fly are the new norm for mobile-savvy shoppers."
Perhaps the new iPad app and redesigned profiles that Pinterest is reportedly planning to release will spike consumer's interest in browsing pinboards for product purchases. However, retailers and website owners can view all images that others have pinned from their website by adding their website's URL (sans the https://www.) into the second half of the Pinterest source URL. For example: https://pinterest.com/source/websitemagazine.com.