My Online Fitness Club Shop review for Pinterest

Aug. 7, 2023

At first, I thought this would be a great sales channel to use, but I soon learned that this was not the case. I tried connecting my Shopify store to my Pinterest account and seemed like there wasn't going to be any issue until I received the "Notice of Merchant Guidelines violation". What was the violation I needed to fix? "Merchant's URL is broken/inactive or requires registration." I'm not sure why that was, but maybe because I am new to Shopify, so I waited a little bit, and deleted the URL that I thought they might have an issue with, then I submitted my first Appeal thinking that was the ONLY issue I needed to fix as that was the only one in the email. Then I get another Notice of Merchant Guidelines violation but this time for something different, for "Merchant is an affiliate marketplace or marketer". That was strange as there is not one affiliate link on our website...So, I thought they must have made a mistake, so I made my second and last Appeal. I wrote a very long response telling them that we will make any change necessary in order to get our Shopify store connected, even if it means, deleting all our content on Pinterest and beginning again. I pleaded with them to reconsider and actually take a look at our website as up until this point it really didn't seem as if they even looked at our website. It seemed as if these responses were some copy-and-paste answers from them. None of them had any specific answers but just some generic answers. Thinking that they'd actually review my website and accept our store, I was completely wrong about Pinterest. My Appeal was rejected again, but this time for other issues...one of which was "Merchant's returns policy is unclear or unavailable" This is ridiculous because we have it highlighted in 2 places in our footer. Now, we don't know what to do...Here they start off by telling us to fix 1 thing, which we do, then they tell us to fix something different, which wasn't an issue to actually fix, then our final appeal, they write several issues. The problem is you only have 2 times to correct any issues Pinterest says that you have... Why wouldn't they list all the issues the first time so we could fix those all at once? Probably because they know we can only appeal 2 times, then that's it...What's interesting is that they will have no issues accepting us into their paid Ads programs or anything like that... We're very disappointed with Pinterest and there's absolutely nothing we can do about it... But, now I"m reading on the comments here that they want a store to be at least 9 months old...Well, if that's the case, then why don't they clearly mention that? Especially as they are so concerned that information we have on our website, such as our Returns Policy, is clearly displayed... Overall, a very bad experience with Pinterest, and would not recommend at all...Don't download or try to connect with them and waste your time..