New features announced in the Bing Shopping roadmap have just gone live to help shoppers find what they’re looking for at the best prices and to help retailers showcase their inventories in new places.
What’s new? “Deal-conscious shoppers will now see ‘sales’ and ‘price drops’ marked on applicable items, alongside deal rankings that are ‘good’, ‘great’, or ‘epic’. Additionally, shoppers can choose to compare prices across stores or find a product’s price history over time, in just one click,” said Microsoft Bing’s Blog. We first announced this in our coverage last week, as Microsoft works to become more of a recommendation engine for shoppers online: “Using privacy-focused shopper data, the shopping experience will eventually become ‘query-less’ says Chatterjee. Being able to make ‘for you’ recommendations will ‘add another dimension for users.’ Bing will be able to customize shopping suggestions based on these shopper types and the overall retail landscape trends it’s seeing.”
Checkout directly in Edge browser. Along with these deal indicators for price-conscious shoppers, Microsoft Bing is making checkout as easy as possible to smooth any barriers to conversion for shoppers: “When a shopper is ready to buy, they can easily see if their item is available for ‘curbside pickup,’ or can try our new ‘Buy Now’ feature for Amazon products that directly adds the item to Amazon’s cart. We’ve also begun rolling out express checkout on Edge to make purchase just a few clicks on any seller website!”
Why we care. These new features enhance the experience for shoppers who want to be able to compare prices, get the best deals, and know what’s trending — all in a single interface. For retailers, it’s easy to participate in with feed-based Merchant Center integrations, like Shopify. While there is some disadvantage to not being able to make the case why your product may cost more (commoditization of products), having them all in a single view for shoppers can reduce barriers to conversion and easy checkout could improve those conversions. It’s worth trying and monitoring.
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