How to Use Pinterest to Find New Private Label Product Ideas

Pinterest is an untapped goldmine for private label product ideas for those who can navigate the interface with expertise and precision.

While there’s no shortage of websites that offer ways to give you product ideas for your private label business, social platforms don’t get much notice. However, platforms like Pinterest can be great resources if you know how to use them for more than just entertainment or light reading.

In this series, we’ll explore five online platforms that are product idea goldmines in disguise and will provide you with an innovative stream of new private label product ideas.

There’s so much to love about Pinterest, starting with its simple, user-friendly interface and excellent product imagery in its robust visual feed.

For those who aren’t familiar with Pinterest, here’s the lowdown:

What’s So Great About Pinterest?

The entire Pinterest interface is a series of images that you can “pin” onto a board that you create through your account.

You can follow particular boards based on their subject matter or other users if you like the images they pin. You can also perform a general search to discover new boards that might be of interest.

Once you click on a photo you like, similar images will appear below it.

Pinterest also has a reasonably new Lens feature that links to your mobile device and allows you to take photos of objects, people, places, and things. After you take the picture, Pinterest offers you similar product suggestions relating to the item you photographed.

That image above was taken with an iPhone using Pinterest’s Lens feature. The photograph of the succulent in a tabletop planter offers suggestions for plants, succulents, garden, herbs, and planters. Depending on where your product interest lies, you can either choose one or more of the sub-categories to narrow your search or continue scrolling through the images to find one that shows promise.

Products Are Easy to Find on Pinterest

To give you an idea of Pinterest’s reach, a rundown of its stats shows 175 million active monthly users, 1 billion+ boards, 50 billion+ pins, and two-thirds of its pins representing brand and product. In other words, a lot of people are using Pinterest, and there’s no shortage of product ideas on it.

Product images are categorized into specific niches to ensure your search is narrowed down from the get-go. The pulldown menu shown below offers sub-niches for the categories.

If you have an idea of the kinds of products you’re interested in selling, you can perform keyword searches either as single words or keyword bundles. For instance, if you’re interested in gadgets, a search for that can yield pretty broad results of all sorts of different gadgets.

Along with the search results, Pinterest provides the same category suggestions as the Lens feature. You can use that or specify your search term. So instead of just searching for “gadgets,” you could plug in “gadgets for home” and comb through the listings to find something like the product we found below. It isn’t unique, but it’s an interesting variation of a sponge-holder for dishes that could be modified, enhanced or produce a byproduct.

Alternatively, you can ignore the sub-categories if you’re not sure what kind of product you want to sell.

Another easy way to find product ideas is to just search for boards that list product ideas for this very purpose. Be forewarned though—it’s a bit of a floodgate if you’re going in totally blind.

How Do You Seach for Products That May Not Exist Yet?

Once you have enough pins of a given product type, you can perform a search on Amazon to see if an ASIN exists for that kind of product.

If there are listings, use Cerebro by Helium 10 to perform a reverse ASIN search on the products to discover valuable information like ranking keywords. If no ASIN exists, return to Pinterest to see how many times the product has been pinned to gauge people’s interest in the item, then move on to further market research.

In this example, we searched for sponge-holders and found a lot of listings but none as unique as the one on Pinterest. Further research can help you lock down the idea or a good variation of it.

While you can indeed succeed in selling trendy, high-competition items, ideal products for private label sales are low competition with high demand.

In Pinterest, the ideal product is the one that has been pinned by A LOT of people but has little to no Amazon listings. This excessive pinning tells you that there is a need and a market for that product.

After you get a good idea of a product’s traction on Pinterest, you can start data-mining. It’s much less overwhelming than it sounds. We’ll discuss it in more detail towards the end of this series, so make sure to continue reading!

What Next?

Now that you’ve got the relevant information on your product and your research shows good demand for it, your next step is to look into how you’ll source or manufacture your product.

There are many outsourcing options for you, but the key lies in finding the right fit, so you feel confident in your choice and comfortable in growing a business from it.

A Few Caveats Before You Dive In

As you’re taking all this information in, keep a few things in mind:

Images uploaded or pinned on Pinterest sometimes fall under copyright and trademark laws. You can read more about them on Pinterest’s Terms & Privacy page.

There are instances in which original pinners don’t want their image to be reused, especially for your business or marketing purposes.

If you’re going to collect the product images you’ve curated on your own Pinterest board, make sure they’re pinnable. You don’t want a user reporting you for lifting content without permission. Find great products, but don’t break any laws!

Finally, like anything else, Pinterest isn’t foolproof, and you may not find what you’re looking for on it.

For a refresh on our Goldmine series for finding private label products on social platforms, revisit the introduction to this series.

Read the other parts of the series below:

• How to Use Etsy to Find Private Label Product Ideas
• How to Use Kickstarter to Find Private Label Product Ideas
• How to Use Subscription Boxes to Find Private Label Product Ideas
• How to Use Life Hack Blogs to Find Private Label Product Ideas
• Find Private Label Product Ideas with THESE Market Research Method

Have you had success using Pinterest to find new products when selling private label on Amazon? Let us know in the comments below!