Will Shoppers Click with Bing Shopping?

Microsoft continues to wrestle with the e-commerce side of its search engine, Bing, in an effort to more effectively compete with Google’s dominance.

The company discontinued Bing Cashback as of July 30. Bing Cashback was a novel way for shoppers to save money by earning a percentage of the price paid for an online product as “cashback” – in essence, an instant rebate. The cashback was paid out of proceeds from search advertising fees from participating stores. Consumers received cashback payments through PayPal, direct deposit, or mailed checks.

George Michie, CEO & Co-Founder of The Rimm-Kaufman Group, a search engine marketing firm, tells Internet Retailer, “Cashback was a big win for merchants and users, but I don’t know how big a win it was for Bing in terms of buying market share.” According to Microsoft, while Bing Cashback attracted over a thousand merchant partners, it “did not see the broad adoption that we had hoped for.”

Bing is trying to remove the sting from killing Cashback with the launch of Bing Shopping, which appears as a navigational link on the Bing home page. Bing Shopping is following Google’s lead in offering online retailers free clicks from the Bing Shopping page. Microsoft confirmed that a product feed service for merchants was being offered without charge, so product listings and images show up in search results as essentially free placements. Eventually, Microsoft is expected to add paid advertising to the mix.

Bing Shopping is a nicely organized shopping portal, with featured products, featured stores, and “products people are talking about.” It will offer some new search marketing features; for example, “shopping slide shows” allow consumers to click through product photos and purchase a product of interest, directly through the portal. Bottom line, however: Bing Shopping is basically similar to Google Product Search, with some added functionality.

Bing Shopping will also be similar to Google Product Search in ranking products. Rick Backus, co-founder of CPC Strategy, an online data firm, tells Internet Retailer, “Bing’s data on search clicks will be part of its overall algorithm that ranks product search results, giving popular retailers an advantage.”

But the big question about Bing Shopping is whether the search engine can drive enough traffic to build the numbers merchants want, especially in terms of sales conversions. Bing Cashback presented a pretty compelling reason to shop because of attractive rebate offers. Bing Shopping has no such built-in incentive.

Bing Shopping needs to do two things quickly: get as many merchants as possible to participate, and get as many shoppers as possible to visit. Launched last summer, Bing has seen increases in traffic, but its U.S. market share is under 10 percent, while Google’s is over 71 percent. Microsoft has also been losing money in its Online Services division.

If Bing Shopping can’t make the cash registers ring for online retailers, dumping Bing Cashback may come back to haunt Microsoft.