Pinterest adds a former chief technology officer at Walmart as it speeds up e-commerce

While Pinterest plans to launch its IPO later this year, the platform is looking to step up its e-commerce efforts to capitalize on its discovery and connection tools, connecting its 250 million users directly to a wide range of online merchants.

In the same vein, the company announced this week the hiring of Jeremy King, former technical director of Walmart, as chief engineering officer.

As explained by Pinterest:

"Expert in developing e-commerce and designing and scaling consumer products in the world's largest retail organization [Jeremy] was previously CTO and SVP at Walmart Labs, EVP at LiveOps and VP of Engineering at eBay. During his tenure at Walmart, Jeremy led the e-commerce technical team, responsible for US retail store technology and e-commerce for Walmart and Jet. Focusing on creating seamless shopping experiences, he oversaw customer, merchant and supply chain technologies on cloud and data platforms. "

This is quite the summary, especially for the needs of Pinterest. Indeed, King's main role at Walmart was to reorganize the company's e-commerce platform, making it faster, more competitive, and more user-friendly, to counter the growing competition from Amazon. To do this, the company has focused on services such as in-store online order pickup, easy returns and online shopping.

And these efforts have clearly paid off – back in November, eMarketer reported that Walmart had surpbaded Apple to become the third largest online retailer in the US and was on the verge of capturing 4% of all online retailers by the end of the year.

This experience will be invaluable for Pinterest projects. While he plans to evolve his direct purchase options, King will be responsible for overseeing each element of the order chain, which is likely to spur even more action by the time Pinterest is expanding its advertising tools to new markets and deploys its fully automated "Shop the Look" solution. Product identification and recommendation pins.

There is a lot going on at Pinterest. As we noted previously, even though Pinterest may have a relatively small number of users compared to other social networks, Pinterest itself does not see itself as a social platform. Instead, Pinterest is a visual discovery network and its users, although not as numerous, arrive on the platform with a very specific shopping mentality, resulting in an intention and activity of higher purchase. In this sense, Pinterest is really competing with Google and Amazon, something that King obviously knows very well. And there must be a reason why he chose to join the platform instead of staying with Walmart.

This addition will greatly boost Pinterest and you can expect to see even more development within the company as it approaches its IPO. It will be interesting to see how they will do it, especially with this new knowledge added to their ranks.