The usual WooCommerce setup: Pinterest for WooCommerce
Most stores start with Pinterest for WooCommerce, the free extension developed by Woo. It syncs your product catalog to Pinterest every day so your products become shoppable Pins, adds the Pinterest tag for conversions and retargeting, and can send events server-side through the Pinterest Conversions API (extension listing and docs, checked October 2026). Its tag tracks page visits, category views, searches, add to cart and checkout.
For catalog sync and a Shop tab on your Pinterest profile, it's the obvious choice and there's no reason to drop it. The questions below are about the purchase signal: does every paid order reach Pinterest, with the click, exactly once?
Why WooCommerce loses Pinterest sales
- The gap between click and purchase. Someone clicks a promoted Pin on their phone, saves the product and buys days or weeks later. By then Safari may have cleared the cookie that held the click.
- Payment methods that leave your site, such as PayPal, iDEAL in a bank app, Klarna or a hosted card page. The buyer pays and closes the tab, so the order-received page, where browser tags report the checkout, never loads.
- Ad blockers and privacy browsers that block the Pinterest tag.
- Cookie banners that hold the tag back until consent, and script-delay settings in optimization plugins that wait for an interaction buyers on a thank-you page often don't make.
- Cached order-received pages, which can show a buyer a page without the order data the tag needs.
What Pinterest needs to credit a Pin
Pinterest's standard event for a completed order is checkout, not purchase. To link a checkout to the ad, it uses whatever it gets with the event:
- epik: Pinterest's click id, added to your landing URL when someone clicks a promoted Pin.
- The _epik cookie the Pinterest tag sets in the browser.
- Hashed email and phone (SHA-256), plus hashed name, city, postcode and country.
- IP address and user agent from the visit.
- Order id, value, currency and the products.
Which WooCommerce orders should count as checkout
Pinterest optimizes campaigns toward the checkouts you send. If unpaid orders count, it looks for more people who start a bank transfer and never finish it. Only paid orders belong in Pinterest:
- Processing or Completed after a successful payment: send it.
- On hold (bank transfer, cash on delivery): wait until the order is actually paid.
- Pending payment, Failed, Cancelled, Refunded or a checkout draft: don't send it.
- Processing turning into Completed is the same order and must not create a second checkout.
How Settl sends WooCommerce orders to Pinterest
The Settl Tracking plugin saves the epik click id when a visitor lands from a promoted Pin and keeps it in a first-party cookie for 90 days. If the Pinterest tag has set its _epik cookie, the plugin reads that too. At checkout the click is stored on the order itself.
When WooCommerce marks the order paid, the plugin passes it to Settl, which sends a checkout event to the Pinterest Conversions API from the server. It carries the order id, value, currency, the products and number of items, the epik click, hashed email, phone, name, city, postcode and country, and the visitor's IP address and user agent. Custom order statuses you use after payment, such as Shipped, still count as paid.
Every hour Settl asks the plugin for the paid orders of the past week and sends any that are missing, so a hosting hiccup or a slow payment confirmation doesn't cost you the sale. With server-side shopping steps switched on, page visits, searches and add to cart go to Pinterest from the server as well.
Avoid counting the same order twice
Pinterest keeps one event when two sources send the same event id for the same order. Settl's plugin doesn't add the Pinterest tag to your store, so if you also run a tag or a second Conversions API connection from another plugin, those events carry their own ids and won't match Settl's.
So pick one source for the checkout event. If you use Settl for purchases, keep Pinterest for WooCommerce for catalog sync and browsing events, but don't let it send checkout through its own Conversions API connection as well. Then check in Pinterest Ads Manager: under Conversions you can see per event type whether it came from the tag, the API or both. If checkouts are roughly double your paid orders from Pinterest, two sources are reporting the same sales.
Your options on WooCommerce (checked October 2026)
Pinterest for WooCommerce is free, made by Woo, and covers catalog sync, the tag and a Conversions API option in one place. For many stores that's enough.
Pixel plugins, such as FunnelKit's Pinterest integration, let you pick which WooCommerce events go to Pinterest from a settings screen. A Google Tag Manager setup with a WooCommerce data layer gives you full control if you're comfortable maintaining it.
Settl focuses on the purchase: paid orders only, with the click kept for 90 days, sent from the server and rechecked every hour. The same plugin covers Meta, TikTok, Google Analytics 4 and Google Ads, Snapchat, X, Microsoft Advertising and Reddit, so you don't need a separate setup per platform.
How to check it works
Place a real order with a payment method that leaves your site. Close the tab right after paying. In Pinterest Ads Manager, under Conversions, a checkout event with your order's value should still appear as coming from the API.
Then judge Pinterest on a fair window. Pin sales often land late, so a campaign that looks weak after three days can look very different after thirty. Compare checkout value too, not just count.