Pinterest has undergone a significant transformation in the last year.

The visual discovery platform has begun to drive more shopping on its service, more than two years after CEO Bill Ready took the reins. In Q4, Pinterest crossed the $1 billion mark in quarterly revenue for the first time. It also reported that clicks to advertisers grew 90% YoY for the most recent quarter.

The secret sauce seems to be its one-click-out strategy for all of Pinterest’s ad products, Carrie Sweeney, the platform’s VP of retail partnerships, told Retail Brew in January at CES: “We took away the close-up last year, where you would click on an image, it would pop up bigger, and then youʼd have to click again to get out.”

Now, itʼs one outbound click for everything that has any type of commercial intent on Pinterest. “The pinners have said, ‘We donʼt want a close up. We want to get to the stuff,’” Sweeney said. She added the zoom-in feature was starting to add friction to the commerce experience. In a sit-down chat on the sidelines of CES, Sweeney talked about what’s next for Pinterest.

Keep reading here.—VC

Just across the hall from an exhibition floor packed with vendors peddling new technology solutions at eTail Palm Springs, Richard Jones, chief revenue officer at performance marketing platform Wunderkind, made the case that many retailers feel as though there are “too many tools and not enough results.”

“We've been sold a dream that more technology equals better performance,” Jones said in a keynote. “But here we are drowning in tools, drowning in logins and dashboards.”

He pointed to a data point from business research firm Gartner: Companies only utilized 33% of their marketing tech stack in 2024, down from 58% in 2020. “That’s a massive amount of wasted investment that isn’t helping drive profitable growth,” he said.

Keep reading here.—AV

Walmart is becoming more like a department store, as the mass retailer takes steps to expand and improve its fashion offerings, according to Denise Incandela, EVP of fashion at Walmart, who spoke at eTail Palm Springs on Tuesday.

“Some of our customers come in and feel like they’re in a department store,” she said.

Typical for Walmart, price is at the center of this pivot. Incadela said her division noticed “white space” in the market for clothing in the $15–$40 range. National brands weren’t falling within that sweet spot, and Walmart’s own private label offerings were often falling below it. To fill this gap, the company started working with fashion designers such as Brandon Maxwell to launch brand offerings that fit the bill.

Keep reading here.—AV