With Pinterest reportedly considering an IPO for later in the year, Google has this week taken a shot at the platform's core offering by announcing a new product discovery option that will enable brands to reach consumers who are searching via Google Images.
According to Google, the new "shoppable ads on Google Images" will allow businesses to tag multiple products available for sale in their sponsored ad, which will appear among targeted Google Images results (you can see the small 'sponsored' tag in the bottom left of the image above). Users will be able to tap on the shopping tag icon in the bottom right of the image to see the detail on any buyable items within the frame.

Google says that it is currently testing the option with a small subset of queries related to searches like "home office ideas", "shower tile designs", and "abstract art.".

"Let’s say a shopper is searching for home office ideas on her mobile device or desktop and goes to Google Images to explore ideas around how to organize her room. She can scroll through the images, hover over any sponsored ad with the price tag, and see the items for sale in the image -- along with prices, the brand, and more. We’ll continue to roll this out to more categories across more retailers over the next few months."

They kinda look familiar, right?
That's because Pinterest released almost an identical version three years ago, through its own product identification and shopping tags.
Pinterest has further refined and updated its visual discovery offerings - most recently through the automation of its 'Shop the Look' Pins - and that visual search capacity has become key to the platform's evolving tools, helping users find and purchase relevant items, based purely on visual cues and similarities.

Instagram has also been introducing the same, albeit with its version of shopping tags-which, in recent times, it has also added to Instagram Stories.
Google's is more advertiser specific than Pinterest's, so it feels more like Instagram's version of this, but the principle is the same. More people are searching for stuff on Google Images, so brands will now have a way to reach them-which will no doubt appeal to a lot of businesses, particularly those in the categories listed in Google's test.

Indeed, statistics are proving to be on the upward spiral of visual search usage by consumers, as the user base is increasingly becoming habituated to being able to seek something using their mobile by its image match, which might often prove useful for price match as well as interest-based search requests. Considering this, adding Google makes a lot of sense, and this also shall help the search giant defend some rising competition for the same coming from other providers.
Continuing with this, Google also highlights that more and more advertisers are now using the platform's "Showcase Shopping ads", which allow brands to push their products through feed-style highlighted ads. Considering growing interest in the option for other formats, Google is now also bringing its Showcase Shopping tool to relevant Google Image queries as well, enabling brands to add 'social-like' feeds that take up prime real estate near the top of the screen.
Google is also introducing new ways for brands to upload more of their product information, enabling Google to further showcase relevant product matches and details within relevant search queries.

Is that a concern for Pinterest - the fact that Google could potentially rain on its IPO parade by rolling out similar tools as it already has, and providing them to much larger audiences, who are already heading to Google for their search queries? It'd certainly have to be a consideration, one of the key risks noted in the platform's initial filing. If Google were to view Pinterest as a legitimate threat for a large portion of search queries, it could look to ramp up its efforts on this front, and optimize its visual search tools to stem the tide, and promote its own options as the best place for product discovery.

But at the moment, it is actually better off in this context. Pinterest has focused entirely on product search, and so its tools were developed to answer that one specific use. That is the reason why efforts by Instagram in eCommerce would not become a significant headache for Pinterest, at least not today, because its long-term has been on the core function, and will take sometime for others to catch up with.
But they could, sure enough, catch up. Each of Google and Instagram indicated that they're working on similar tools, that on-platform shopping will be a major option for them. Each has far more users than Pinterest, which has a current 250 million monthly actives.

The concern for Pinterest is that these larger providers could be waiting for it to list in order to exert more pressure, squeezing the company after it comes under the watchful eyes of the market. That would then make it harder for Pinterest to grow - we’ve seen similar in Facebook’s tactics to suppress Snapchat since Snapchat went public.

Again, Pinterest will probably mention these risks in its documentation, but it will be interesting to see if the expected Pinterest IPO leads to a ramp up in similar visual search and eCommerce offerings from Google and Facebook (through Instagram), and what that means for the platform moving forward.