Survey: 21% of users on Pinterest have purchased an item that they found on the site

There’s no doubt that Pinterest continues to gain traction in for users who enjoy creating collections of things to share with others. We know that businesses are seeing tons of traffic to their sites from Pinterest users as well, showing that the premise of curated collections on a social network could actually generate sales.

Daily deals site Fab.com even noticed that Pinterest has started generating more traffic to it than sites like Twitter.

Other than the much-discussed fact that most Pinterest users happen to be women, we don’t know much more than that about the fanatical “pinners”. With a sizable sample of U.S. consumers, PriceGrabber has released some interesting survey results about people who use the site regularly.

Return users who cook and buy

By far, the most popular interest for the people who took the survey is cooking, followed up by home decorating, crafting, fashion, entertainment, and gardening. A whopping 70% of them said that cooking inspiration and recipes were their number one interest on Pinterest.

How often do they use the site? 37% of people surveyed log in a few times a week, with only 10% saying that they use the site a few times a day. Surprisingly, these folks are all active on the site, having created anywhere from 1-10 “Pinboards” themselves, which shows that people aren’t just consuming on Pinterest, they’re actively creating and re-sharing. Still though, Pinterest hasn’t replaced the usage for Twitter and Facebook, so appears that the site is a complimentary experience for the time being.

The super interesting part about Pinterest to me is that businesses could actually start generating quite a bit of sales from the people who are visiting from the site. By sharing their own products or making sure that they have “Pin” buttons on their site, Pinterest could easily start turning a small online boutique into a hot property in just a few weeks.

The difference between sharing things on Twitter and Pinterest is that people get to see exactly what the item is before they click on it. If businesses make sure that they’re posting great photographs of their items online, the sky is the limit for what Pinterest can do for them.

And Pinterest people aren’t just clicking, they’re buying. Out of the people who were surveyed who had an account on the site, an astonishing 21% of them have actually purchased items that they found on someone’s Pinboard. The most popular products fall in line with the interests I told you about above. That means that people are buying cooking utensils, things to make arts and crafts, and of course clothing.

Spammers are hip to the money they can make from Pinterest to, as illustrated by an interview with one such spammer on The Daily Dot. In the interview, “Steve” says that he’s making over $1,000 a day just from affiliate links he’s adding on Pinterest through bots. When spammers start using a service as heavily as this, and making money, the service is usually primed for stardom.

Pinterest definitely has to clean up the spam and figure out how it can make some money for itself, but in the interim, the users appear to be happy and businesses are finding new customers from a place that didn’t exist until a few months ago. Isn’t the Internet grand?

We’re on Pinterest, come find us!