An API Could Be The Fancy's Kill Move Against Pinterest

by Kin Lane on 05/31/2012

Pinterest and The Fancy are locked in a deathmatch, if you hadn't heard? Compete wrote back in February that The Fancy was poised to take over a chunk of Pinterest's traffic with their new webstore. Fast forward 5 months, The Fancy has just launched an update to their iOS which includes the ability to purchase products from the mobile app with just one click.

Nice move! The Fancy is definitely an easier and cleaner looking site than Pinterest, and with a monetization move, The Fancy could gain even more market share against Pinterest.

Now if The Fancy wanted to seal the deal and put a death nail in Pinterest's coffin, they should launch an API, and make The Fancy a platform. Don't just open up API access to your content--open up API access to your new commerce layer as well.

Once you have this mapped out, deploy a well crafted suite of embeddable objects, like share and buy buttons, along with essential widgets--all with the commerce layer built in.

Developers and non-developers will make sure The Fancy becomes ubiquitous across the web, and because you chose to consider monetization, while making your platform play, and included developers in this model, the entire platform will be sustainable and outlast anything Pinterest can come up with.