Verified Merchant Program FAQ

Source: https://community.pinterest.biz/t5/product-faq/verified-merchant-program-faq/ta-p/4239

What are the benefits of becoming a Verified Merchant?

As a verified merchant, you’ll:

• Be eligible for your products to show up in shopping experiences
• Stand out with a badge on your Pinterest profile and product Pins
• Receive access to Conversion Insights, a new analytics tool

I’ve successfully been onboarded to the Verified Merchant Program but don’t see the Shop tab.

You’ll want to make sure that you’ve created and selected a product group to feature to get your products showing to Pinners on your Shop Tab.

You can create/edit/feature products groups by navigating to Ads > Catalogs > Products Clicking the star allows you to feature up to 8 product groups on the Shop Tab.

Why do I have to set up the required events within the Pinterest Conversion tag to become a Verified Merchant?

The primary reason is to know how often specific products from your Catalog are being viewed, placed in the cart, and purchased. This can help inform the business on:

• How to utilize your advertising budget
• Which products to feature on the Shop Tab
• Dynamic retargeting settings for your future campaigns

Including product_id within the events (PageVisits, AddToCart, and Checkout) will allow you to utilize the Conversion Insight tool to make informed decisions.

My business is located outside of the United States, can I apply to the Verified Merchant Program?

As of Q3 2020, the VMP Program is only open to businesses located in the US. We have plans to expand to businesses in other countries in the future and will be sure to keep businesses informed when we have expansion updates to share.

In the meantime, you can take advantage of the following features available in international markets:

• Implement the Pinterest Tag on your site to take advantage of advanced reporting
• Upload a Catalog to serve paid/organic Product Pins to Pinners

BEST PRACTICES & TROUBLESHOOTING

Source: https://community.pinterest.biz/t5/product-faq/verified-merchant-program-technical-best-practices-and/ta-p/4217

Shopify specific tips:

If you’re using Shopify as a content management tool, check out the Pinterest for Shopify App to automatically set up the Pinterest Conversion tag on your site and create a product catalog in your Pinterest account. Once fully connected, you should be ready to apply to the VMP Program.

If you’re planning to use the Shopify App to pass your product feed and conversion tag, you’ll need to be sure that the Pinterest Conversion Tag isn’t present anywhere. 

• Tag: Often, users have added the conversion tag and checkout event code within Shopify. You’ll want to be sure to remove the conversion code from your Shopify site before connecting your Pinterest & Shopify accounts. If you’ve already connected, you can remove the tag from your Shopify account and then disconnect/reconnect the accounts one more time.
• Feed: if you’ve previously uploaded a feed manually to Pinterest, the Shopify App will not override any existing data feed in your Pinterest account. You can connect Shopify to Pinterest to pass the tag. You’ll need to continue to manage your feed via the URL you’ve added manually within the Catalogs section of your Pinterest.

Feed upload tips:

Always be sure that Pinterest can access your link when adding your product feed’s Data source URL. Check that the link can be accessed by users outside of your organization and include the username and password (if you’ve set one on the URL).

Unhealthy Feed Status

Catalog Needs Attention: You will see this alert if less than 50% of the products in your feed were ingested and able to show on Pinterest. Click View issues, and be sure to check out this article for all the formatting and alert tips.

Unhealthy Tag Status

Tag Needs Attention: You will see this alert if your Tag Health is out of compliance with the Verified Merchant requirements related to the Conversion tag event setup. Click See Details to get a closer look at your conversion reporting to see what needs to be updated within your tag setup.

• An excellent Help Center article for setting up the conversion tag
• Another useful Help Center article for making edits to the required events

Tag Helper Extension: Anytime you have a question with Tag health or conversion tag setup, you can use the Pinterest Tag Helper extension to see what info is getting passed to Pinterest as you navigate your site.

Test Events Tool: Navigate to Ads > Conversions > Test Events within your Pinterest Business account. You’ll be able to enter your website URL and track the conversion event values that are being passed from your site to your Pinterest account in real-time. This tool is especially useful for troubleshooting when events are passing product_id values or if you see a product_id mismatch alert.

Tag Setup tips

Product_id: One of the most overlooked elements of the Pinterest Tag setup, including the product_id value on all three of the required events (PageVisit, AddToCart, Checkout). You want to be sure your product_id values found on your website matches the ‘id’ field for each product in the data feed.

• Example of product_id passback in the Checkout event 

PageVisit: You want to be sure to only place the PageVisit event on your website’s pages for each product for sale within your data feed. We call these Product Description Pages or PDPs. Placing the PageVisit event only on PDP pages will ensure you’re getting accurate reporting for how often users view each of your products.

AddToCart: The AddToCart events should be set up to fire and pass the product_id value only when a user clicks on your “Add to cart” button on your website. A common pitfall that we see is where the AddToCart event fires any time a user visits or loads the website’s ‘Cart’ page – this can lead to overinflated statistics and instances of the AddToCart event firing with no product_id present.

Checkout: The Checkout event should ONLY fire when a user has fully completed a purchase on your website. When a Checkout does fire, it should pass:

• product_id
• value of the items purchased with no symbols (i.e., 100.00 not $100.00) Example: here
• currency (i.e. USD)