How to Connect WooCommerce to Pinterest

Three ways to connect WooCommerce to Pinterest

1. An official plugin or module

The free, official Pinterest for WooCommerce extension syncs products to a Pinterest catalog and can add the Pinterest tag. It works well if you sell only on Pinterest - but it's one more plugin to keep updated, and it only covers Pinterest.

2. Export a file yourself

WooCommerce's built-in product export (Products > Export) gives you a CSV of your WooCommerce catalog, but its columns are WooCommerce's own - "Regular price", "In stock?", "Images" - not the field names and formats Pinterest expects. You'd have to rename and reformat it, and redo that every time something changes. If you go this way, start from our free Pinterest Catalog CSV Template Generator so at least the columns are right.

3. A store catalog connector

A connector reads your WooCommerce catalog through WooCommerce's REST API and builds the Pinterest feed for you. Because WooCommerce can send webhooks, a good connector updates in real time - a price change or a sold-out item reaches your feed within moments, not at the next export. The connector hosts the feed at a URL that Pinterest reads on a schedule, and one connection can usually feed several platforms at once.

What Pinterest needs

• A Pinterest business account with your website claimed - every product link must be on the domain you claimed.
• Seven fields per product: id, title, description, link, image_link, price, and availability (in stock, out of stock, or preorder), plus item_group_id for variants.
• A Google product category is strongly recommended - it's how Pinterest groups and targets products.
• A data source - a CSV, TSV, or XML file uploaded once, or hosted at a URL that Pinterest re-reads about once every 24 hours.

How your WooCommerce fields map to Pinterest

The table above shows where each Pinterest field comes from in your WooCommerce catalog. A few WooCommerce details need extra care:

• Variable products: each variation (Navy / M, Navy / L...) should become its own listing with its own price, stock, and image, all sharing the parent product as their item_group_id. Put sizes and colors in attributes named Size and Color so they can be read reliably.
• Brand: WooCommerce has a built-in Brands feature in recent versions. If you don't use it, your feed needs a default brand - usually your own store's name if you make the products.
• GTIN: recent WooCommerce versions include a "GTIN, UPC, EAN, or ISBN" field on the Inventory tab. Fill it in for products that have barcodes.
• Descriptions are stored as HTML in WooCommerce, so they have to be converted to plain text for the feed.

Step by step

1. Get your Pinterest account ready - see "What Pinterest needs" above.
2. Give read access to your store. WooCommerce has a built-in approval screen for apps, or you can create a key yourself under WooCommerce > Settings > Advanced > REST API with Read permission. Read-only is all a catalog feed needs.
3. Map your product types to Google product categories. Pinterest needs to know what each product is. Map each value of your product attribute (like "Type") to one category from the Google product category list once, and every product with that value is categorized from then on.
4. Add the data source in Pinterest. In Pinterest Business, open Catalogs, add a data source, and paste your feed URL (with its username and password if it's protected). Pinterest checks it, then re-reads it about once a day.
5. Check the first import. Review the errors Pinterest reports and fix them in WooCommerce, not in the feed - your store stays the single source of truth.

Common WooCommerce to Pinterest problems

• Grouped and external/affiliate products. A grouped product has no single price, and an external product links to someone else's site, so neither belongs in your WooCommerce catalog feed. Simple and variable products are the ones to sync.
• Draft, private, or hidden products. Only published products with a public product page can be listed - the link has to open for a shopper.
• "Domain not claimed" or links rejected. Claim the exact domain your product pages use, including whether it has www.
• Products missing after an upload. Check the data source's errors in Pinterest - How to Fix Pinterest Catalog Errors covers each one.

Related guides

For more on Pinterest itself, see What Is a Pinterest Catalog?. Running a Presta catalog instead of a WooCommerce catalog? PrestaShop to Pinterest covers the same setup for PrestaShop.