Microsoft Points to Bing Shopping for Back to School Purchases

Microsoft is pointing consumers to the shopping vertical of its search/decision engine for their back-to school purchases.

The promise from the software giant is that Bing Shopping will help users save money, time and energy that they’d otherwise waste on the tedious back-to-school shopping process.

“Bing Shopping provides comparisons, price finders, allows you to share your shopping lists with your Facebook friends and allows you to see what they “like”, helping you make decisions for all your back to school must-haves,” the Redmond company said.

More than half of the parents gearing up to get their kids ready to start school at the end of summer underline that they’re looking to save as much money as possible when shopping.

The data comes from a recent Bing survey which reveals that while only 52% of the respondents claim to put price ahead of value, some 87% are comparing prices of products from a range of stores and online outlets before deciding on a purchase.

“Parents are so focused on saving money that 44 percent said they will recycle their children’s clothing rather than purchase new ones. Friends opinions matter as well. A computer for school is a big investment and 60 percent of people surveyed won’t buy one without getting their friend’s input first,” the software giant added.

The mobile flavor of Bing can also be of great help to parents, Microsoft notes. m.bing.com is designed to aggregate special deals from a variety of sources.

“As an aggregator of many of the Web’s hottest local deals, including deals from Groupon, LivingSocial and Tippr, Bing mobile deals gives people one-spot access to more than 200,000 local coupons in more than 14,000 cities in the U.S. This is a great feature for the twenty-five percent of Bing survey respondents who hope to spend no more than $100 total on back-to-school purchases,” Microsoft added.