Pinterest has announced an expansion of its ads business into Japan, while it’s also opening a new office in Warsaw as part of its ongoing European market expansion.

First off, on Japan – in one of the most significant expansions of Pinterest ads to date, Japanese businesses will now be able to launch campaigns on the visual discovery channel.

As per Pinterest:

“Starting today, advertisers can reach the 8.7 million people in Japan who use Pinterest every month, many of whom are coming to Pinterest for shopping inspiration. In fact, two out of five people on Pinterest in Japan say they search for ideas on the platform when looking to buy something.”

At 8.7 million active Japanese users, that would make the region one of Pinterest’s top ten user markets, and Pinterest has seen steady growth in the region, rising from 4 million users in 2018.

A big benefit for the platform in this respect is that Asian markets are generally much more advanced in their adoption of eCommerce and online shopping, which could provide big new opportunities for advertisers in the region.

And that extends to small businesses too, with Pinterest also expanding its Shopify partnership to Japanese users, enabling more local merchants to easily add their product catalogs to the app, and start running shopping ads. 

Pinterest announced the first stage of its Shopify integration in 2020, and has since expanded the option to most regions around the world. Pinterest has also updated and improved is catalog ingestion process over time, making it as easy as possible for merchants to connect their inventory data into their content stream.

Which is also a big element of its new Japanese market push.

“Starting today, businesses in Japan can upload their full catalog to Pinterest and automatically turn their products into shoppable Product Pins. Enriched with metadata and formatted to let people on Pinterest know that they’re shoppable, Product Pins feature the most up-to-date price, availability and product title and description from your website. By uploading their catalog of products to Pinterest, businesses can link directly to the product page on their site so Pinners can buy one of their products in just a few clicks.”

It’s an important expansion – and it’s not the only one that Pinterest has announced this week.

In addition to Japan, Pinterest is also expanding its presence in Warsaw, as part of a broader push into the European market.

“Today we’re announcing the opening of our Warsaw office as our first-ever engineering hub in Central Europe. Our new office will enable us to continue to scale our global engineering resources to serve our Pinners, creators and advertisers around the world.”

Pinterest says that it began working in Warsaw after it acquired video editing app VOCHI in December 2021, which had an office and team members already located in the region.

It’s now looking to expand its presence, and use Warsaw as a key engineering and development hub.

“This year, we plan to double our engineering roles in the Warsaw office, who will focus on product development in the areas of video and computer vision for both the VOCHI app and the global Pinterest platform. We’re especially interested in the specialized talent based in Central and Eastern Europe that focus on mobile video creation and consumption, AR and computer vision to build technology and experiences that will power the creative resources we offer for creators on Pinterest.”

Global expansion is important for Pinterest, which has seen its active user rate decline over the past year.

After reaching new highs amid the pandemic lockdowns, Pinterest has struggled to regain that growth momentum, which means that expansion into new markets offers new ways to attract more audience, and generate more interest in the platform’s offerings.

That also leans into increased eCommerce adoption in these regions, and new opportunities for smaller businesses to maximize their exposure to the app’s engaged audience.

Facilitating more opportunity could help in this regard, while Pinterest also continues to refine its in-app shopping and discovery experiences to build new avenues for exposure in the app