Comparison Shopping Engine Spotlight: Bing Shopping
Each month CPC Strategy is releasing a merchant-oriented Comparison Shopping Engine (CSE) Spotlight. Today’s spotlight features the recent release of Bing Shopping, a free CSE like TheFind.com and Google Product Search. We’ll talk about how it operates and why you should list your products there.
If you missed it last month make sure you check out the CSE Spotlight on Google Product Search.
The top three things you need to know about Bing Shopping:
1. Loading products onto Bing Shopping is free. If you’re new to Bing Shopping you can start the application to list your products here.
2. If you were already on Bing Cashback, keep submitting your data feed and you will automatically be brought over to Bing Shopping. Make sure you remove the Bing Cashback tracking pixel and any related Cashback logos from your website.
3. Many of the same best practices with data feed submission for Google Product Search are critical for your success on Bing Shopping, such as submitting clear, descriptive data and mapping all necessary search attributes into the appropriate categories. Click here for a Bing Shopping sample data feed.
How it works:
It’s interesting to compare how Bing’s search results display compares to Google’s. Here’s the search results for watches (click to enlarge):
You can see a product picture box in Bing’s search results that displays products from the watches query, absent in Google’s search results. Also the related searches menu on the left hand side of the Bing search results can help shoppers make a purchasing decision by displaying the most common searches related to a particular search.
Here’s the same search on Google (click to enlarge):
Here’s a picture of the Bing Shopping interface (click to enlarge):
Update the interface completely to ensure the most accurate information reaches your customers.
It will be interesting to see how Bing Shopping converts for our clients. Bing Cashback recently secured second place for the best converting comparison shopping engine category in our quarterly comparison shopping engine rankings. Now shoppers don’t have an incentive to make purchases through the search engine without the Cashback program, which may have an effect on product conversions.
Another topic we’ll be watching closely is if Bing Shopping’s merchant support system increases their responsiveness. Since Bing Shopping is free expect to see an influx of merchants applying to list their products.
Here you can check out how the late Bing Cashback compared to the other comparison shopping engines. Where will Bing Shopping rank in Q3?
Useful links:
Bing Shopping data feed example
Bing Shopping featured in Internet Retailer
Bing Blog detailing the new Bing Shopping
On Thursday 8/12 the Bing Shopping spotlight continues with a merchant best practices blog. Do you have any questions about Bing Shopping? Post a comment here or e-mail contact@cpcstrategy.com and we’ll get back to you.
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