Straight answer: yes, Pinterest allows affiliate links and using it for affiliate marketing is legal, but only if you follow the FTC’s disclosure rules and Pinterest’s own content guidelines around link cloaking and spam. Get those two things wrong and you won’t get banned for “affiliate marketing” as a category, you’ll get flagged for the specific thing you did around it. I’ve run Pinterest accounts for clients since 2015 and the accounts that get shut down almost never get shut down for having affiliate links. They get shut down for hiding what the link is.
If you want to go deeper on this: How Many Business Pinterest Accounts Are You Allowed to Run?.
If you want to go deeper on this: What Are Affiliate Marketing Programs and How They Work (In Plain Engl.
What Pinterest allows (and what it doesn’t)
Pinterest has permitted affiliate links since 2015. That’s not a grey area or a loophole, it’s stated policy. What Pinterest doesn’t like is when the link tries to hide its destination. Heavily shortened URLs, redirect chains through three or four domains, or links dressed up to look like they go somewhere they don’t, all of that gets pins removed and repeat offenders get accounts suspended.
Here’s the bit most guides skip: Pinterest’s Idea Pins (their video-first, feed-native format) don’t support outbound links at all. You cannot put an affiliate link on an Idea Pin. You can only put affiliate links on Standard Pins that go to a real URL. I’ve seen people build entire Idea Pin strategies, get great reach, then wonder why nobody’s clicking through to buy anything. There’s nothing to click. The reach was never going to convert to commissions because the format doesn’t allow it.
So the honest starting point is: know which pin type you’re using before you plan a strategy around it, not after.
The FTC disclosure rule you can’t skip
Whether Pinterest cares or not, the US Federal Trade Commission does. If you earn a commission when someone clicks your pin and buys, that’s a material connection, and the FTC’s Endorsement Guides require a clear disclosure near the link, not buried in a bio or a separate “about” board three clicks away. The FTC’s own guidance on endorsements and disclosures is blunt about this: disclosures need to be hard to miss, in the same place as the claim, not hidden.
On Pinterest that means putting “affiliate link” or “#ad” directly in the pin description, ideally in the first line before Pinterest truncates it, not just somewhere on your website. I’ve had clients disclose only on the landing page and assume that covers them. It doesn’t. The disclosure needs to be visible at the point where the person decides whether to click.
What running this looked like for me
In 2019 I built out a Pinterest account for a client selling a home organisation ebook through her own site plus Amazon affiliate links to the products she recommended in it. We started from zero. Forty pins a month, all original graphics made in Canva, all linking either to her blog posts or straight to Amazon with the affiliate tag and a disclosure line in the description.
First 90 days: around 1,200 outbound clicks, a 1.8% conversion rate on the Amazon links, which came to roughly 340 dollars in commission in that first quarter. Not life changing. But it climbed. By month eight, with the same 40 pins a month rhythm and older pins still circulating (Pinterest content has a long tail, unlike a tweet or an Instagram post that dies in 48 hours), monthly commission was closer to 900 dollars, and that pin volume was still under two hours of work a week because most of it was templated.
The part that built the account wasn’t clever pin design. It was pin descriptions written like search queries, because Pinterest behaves far more like Google than like a social feed. “Small kitchen organisation ideas for renters” outperformed anything cute or clickbaity every single time.
Step by step: setting this up without getting flagged
- Step 1: Check the affiliate program‘s terms before you post a single pin. Amazon Associates explicitly allows Pinterest. Some ShareASale and CJ merchants restrict “image-sharing sites” in their individual program terms, so read the specific merchant agreement, not just the network’s blanket policy.
- Step 2: Use direct or lightly wrapped links, not aggressive shorteners. A standard Amazon Associates link or a tracked link through a plugin like Pretty Links is fine. A raw bit.ly with no context around it is the kind of thing that gets pins pulled.
- Step 3: Build boards around search intent, not personality. “Budget Wedding Decor Under 100 Pounds” gets found. “Sarah’s Faves” doesn’t.
- Step 4: Design at 1000×1500 pixels, vertical, with text overlay readable on a phone screen. Pinterest’s own data has repeated for years that this ratio outperforms square or horizontal images by a wide margin in the feed.
- Step 5: Put the disclosure in the first line of the pin description. Something plain like “Affiliate link, I earn a small commission at no extra cost to you” works and satisfies the FTC requirement.
- Step 6: Pin consistently rather than in bursts. Fifteen to twenty-five fresh pins a week, spread out, performs better long term than fifty pins in one day then silence for a month. Pinterest’s algorithm rewards accounts that behave predictably.
- Step 7: Track clicks separately from your website analytics using UTM tags. Pinterest’s own analytics undercounts outbound conversions, so cross check in Google Analytics or your affiliate dashboard, not just the Pinterest business account.
What gets pins buried
Reused pin images. If you take the exact same graphic and repin it to five boards on the same day, Pinterest treats that as spam behaviour now, not free extra reach the way it did years ago. Create small variations, different text overlay, different crop, even for the same destination link.
Direct linking straight to an Amazon product page from a cold pin with zero context also underperforms compared to linking to a blog post or roundup that then links to Amazon. It sounds like an extra step that costs you conversions. In my testing it did the opposite, because the blog post gives Pinterest and the reader more relevance signal before the sale, and the conversion rate on the second click was consistently higher than on the raw cold click.
Video pins get meaningfully more reach right now, often two to three times the impressions of a static pin in the same board, but they still can’t carry a direct affiliate link if you use the Idea Pin format, which brings us back to the format trap above.
The part nobody selling a Pinterest course wants to say out loud
Most people who try Pinterest affiliate marketing make very little for a long time, and a fair chunk of the people loudly claiming four figure monthly Pinterest income are making that money from selling courses and templates about how to make money on Pinterest, not from the affiliate links themselves. That’s not an accusation, it’s just how the maths of survivorship bias works in this space, and it’s worth knowing before you set your expectations from someone’s screenshot.
The realistic range for someone starting from zero, doing it with consistent weekly pinning and reasonable niche selection, is fifty to three hundred pounds a month somewhere between month four and month nine. That’s not nothing, especially since the time cost drops once you’ve built templates, but it’s not the passive income fantasy either. It behaves more like slow compounding SEO than like a social media campaign, and it needs to be treated that way in your planning, not as a quick side hustle you’ll evaluate after three weeks.
Where the legal risk sits
The genuine legal exposure isn’t Pinterest banning you, it’s the FTC. Pinterest banning you costs you an account. An FTC enforcement action for undisclosed material connections is a federal matter, and while most cases target larger creators and brands rather than someone earning three hundred pounds a month, the rule doesn’t have a size exemption. If you’re monetising, disclose, every pin, every time, in the description, first line, plain English.
The second risk is contractual, not legal in the government sense. Individual affiliate programs terminate accounts for platform misuse far more often than governments prosecute anyone, and getting removed from Amazon Associates or a network like Awin for a terms violation can undo months of pinning work in one email. Read the specific program terms for Pinterest use, not just the general affiliate agreement, because they’re often different documents.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need a website to do Pinterest affiliate marketing, or can I link straight to Amazon or another retailer?
You can link straight to a retailer if the affiliate program allows it, Amazon Associates does, but pins that route through your own blog post or landing page first consistently convert better because they build context and trust before the click, and they let you add real disclosure and content rather than just a bare link.
Will Pinterest ban my account for using affiliate links?
Not for having affiliate links themselves, since Pinterest has explicitly allowed them since 2015. Accounts get suspended for cloaking link destinations, repeatedly reposting identical images, or spammy pinning behaviour, so the fix is transparency and variation, not avoiding affiliate links altogether.
How much can you realistically earn from Pinterest affiliate marketing?
Most people starting from scratch see somewhere between fifty and three hundred pounds a month by month four to nine of consistent pinning, based on real client results I’ve overseen. It grows slowly and compounds because Pinterest content stays discoverable for months, unlike a social post, but it is rarely fast money.
Do I have to disclose affiliate links on Pinterest even though it’s not the US?
If you’re a UK creator earning commission, the Advertising Standards Authority and CAP Code require similarly clear disclosure, and if any of your audience or the merchant is US based, FTC rules can still apply. The safest approach anywhere is the same: disclose plainly in the pin description, not buried on your site.
