Google Loses President of Commerce to Pinterest

With Bill Ready presiding over commerce and payments at Google, the search giant made some significant seller-friendly changes. But after only 2 and a half years, Ready is leaving Google to become CEO of Pinterest on June 29, 2022.

“As someone who has spent most of my career in commerce and payments, it’s so clear to me that Pinterest has the opportunity to build something unique—something special,” Ready wrote in a post on LinkedIn on Tuesday.

Pinterest co-founder and CEO Ben Silbermann will transition to the newly created role of Executive Chairman. “Bill understands deep down that Pinterest is still early in its story,” Silbermann wrote in an email to employees at Pinterest.

It’s clear Pinterest is looking to Ready to use his experience in ecommerce to turbocharge growth and monetize the site (prior to Google, Ready was a top executive at PayPal). Andrea Wishom, a direct of the board at Pinterest, said Ready’s experience in payments, product development, and shopping “uniquely positions him to take Pinterest to its next phase of growth.”

Pinterest wrote in its press release on Tuesday that it has built a healthy advertising business and has continuously improved its roadmap, and invested in creators, shopping and scaling internationally.

But what will Ready’s departure mean for Google? Under his leadership, Google reversed its “pay-to-play” policy for sellers to get exposure on Google Shopping and also gave sellers free visibility on Google Search.

You can look for clues about Google’s future approach to commerce by watching a presentation given last month by Prabhakar Raghavan at Google’s I/O developers conference. The executive, who is Google Senior Vice President responsible for Google Search, Assistant, Geo, Ads, Commerce, and Payments products, shared his a vision for how Google could win at ecommerce, according to Bloomberg.

Pinterest Factoids:

Pinterest launched in 2010 and now calls itself a “visual inspiration platform” that people use to shop products personalized to their taste.

Headquartered in San Francisco, it has over 400 million monthly active users worldwide.

People have saved over 300 billion Pins across a range of interests using Pinterest.com and apps on iOS and Android.

Ina Steiner

Ina Steiner is co-founder and Editor of EcommerceBytes and has been reporting on ecommerce since 1999. She's a widely cited authority on marketplace selling and is author of "Turn eBay Data Into Dollars" (McGraw-Hill 2006). Her blog was featured in the book, "Blogging Heroes" (Wiley 2008). She is a member of the Online News Association (Sep 2005 - present) and Investigative Reporters and Editors (Mar 2006 - present). Follow her on Twitter at @ecommercebytes and send news tips to ina@ecommercebytes.com. See disclosure at EcommerceBytes.com/disclosure/.