Shopial Review: Everything You Need to Know

If you subscribe to a service from a link on this page, Reeves and Sons Limited may earn a commission. See our ethics statement.

In the past, selling on Pinterest has been possible through some platforms like Shopify and Bigcommerce. However, the release of Pinterest Buyable Pins, a system that lets you put Buy buttons on pins, has sent online merchants rushing to figure out the best ways to develop a Pinterest store.

As of right now, Pinterest Buyable Pins are implemented one by one, with manual tags to show customers that they are able to buy something through your store.

It’s not a bad system, but something is certainly missing.

Creating your Pinterest store shouldn’t be so complicated, particularly if you’re running an ecommerce shop with hundreds, or thousands, of items.

Imagine trying to pin that many products by hand!

Apparently a solution has arisen, in the form of a company called Shopial.

logo

The Shopial program has been around for a bit, but it’s focused mainly on Facebook store integrations with platforms such as eBay, Etsy and Shopify. The tool works rather well for that purpose, but now it has released a new option for Pinterest.

Shopial is billed at the first-ever product that allows online retailers to pin all their products on Pinterest in one click. Sounds awesome, so let’s take a look if it holds up the promise.

How’s the Shopial Pricing?

connect

Shopial has made a solid business out of its Facebook integration, and over the lifespan of that product you never technically needed to pay a dime to make your own Facebook store. Well, it turns out, the same goes for the Shopial Pinterest combination.

However, that’s only if you don’t have too many products.

I really dislike the fact that Shopial is not transparent at all when it comes to pricing. Yes, it’s a good product, but they use an extremely annoying method of telling people their product is completely free, then asking for upgrades after you start to surpass a certain amount of products listed.

For example, if you list more than six Facebook products, you’re required to start paying a monthly fee. This can go all the way up to $24.99 per month.

I’m not sure why the company doesn’t simply list the pricing on the website, considering $24.99 per month isn’t much, and they risk ticking off some customers who think the whole product is going to be free.

Anyway, the Pinterest configuration has a similar model, where you signup for free, post up to 10 products, then they ask for you to signup for a subscription after surpassing that threshold.

So, you have two options:

  • Free Package – Up to 10 products and one Pinterest board.
  • Premium Package – It costs between $4.99 and $6.99 per month and you get an unlimited number of pins plus automatic syncing once a day.

What Are the Most Important Shopial Features?

Instant Update Between Store and Pinterest

update

I figure that most online store owners worry about future products that need to be implemented into the Pinterest system. After all, you’re not going to constantly check-in every week to pin one or two products that have been added to your online store.

So, Shopial updates and syncs the Pinterest board with your online shop, and it works wonderfully. If your prices or descriptions change on the website, they also change on Pinterest. The same goes for new product updates.

Initial Uploads for Your Current Products

free-upload_page_02

Adding your entire catalog is another primary feature store owners are going to love. It takes a little while depending on the size of your store, but overall you shouldn’t have to do anything manually. I wish they’d have a more itemized list that you could cross reference after, but maybe a feature like that will come around later. What I mean by that is it’s tough to see if all of your products have actually been uploaded.

status_page_03

As you can see in the image above, they provide a number of your products displayed, but what if this number is slightly off? You don’t have a great method for going in and figuring out which items were missed.

Image, Title, Description and Link Pulls

sample-shop

The images, titles and descriptions come in pretty clean, but I noticed that you need to kind of think about standard Pinterest image dimensions before expecting all of your images to show up properly. Oh yea, and it’s not a bad idea to go through and simplify some of your product descriptions, because some of them are way too long and overwhelming for the Pinterest interface.

A Quick Facebook Signup

One of the coolest parts of this tool is the Facebook signup process. You don’t need to currently have a Pinterest page or really any knowledge about Pinterest at all. Simply signup with Facebook and watch as the system generates a store just for you.

sign-in-page_01

Is Shopial Support Any Good?

Shopial is a rather simple app, so I didn’t expect much from the support team. It turns out I was right to assume so, because they don’t have many support documents or outlets for you to contact them. An email form is provided, but you don’t gain access to live chat or a phone line.

They do have a quick video on how to setup your Pinterest shop, but not much in terms of resolving problems you may encounter. The best resource is located on the Support page, and it’s more of an FAQ.

Who’s Shopial Best Suited For?

Overall, Shopial seems like a great way to tap into Pinterest’s social shopping potential. Keep in mind that Shopial is just now rolling out the Pinterest feature, so you may see some early bugs.

Over 18,000 merchants have already preregistered for the Pinterest feature, so it’s clearly seeing some interest. We recommend it for medium-to-large stores that don’t want to go through the trouble of pinning manually. Super small stores probably don’t need this, but you can try it out for free if you want.

If you have any questions about Shopial or Buyable Pins, drop a line in the comments section below. We’re interested to see what people have to say after trying it out.

Comments 1 Response

  1. Ashley says:

    Do not use this company. Their customer service sucks. They charge you for more months than you sign up for. They overall have been a bad experience

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Rating *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.