14 DAY TRIAL // The latest enhancements introduced to the shopping vertical of Microsoft’s search / decision engine make it easier for customers to share product lists with friends, take advantage of discounts and get to the items relevant to them faster and easier than before.
The volume of products available on Bing Shopping has expanded by no less than five times in the past year alone, according to Cornelia Carapcea, Program Manager, Bing Shopping.
Of course, this should hardly be a surprise, especially considering the fast pace at which Bing Shopping, but also Bing itself, has been evolving. Case in point: new features designed to enhance the shopping experience for users are now live.
Searching and filtering tasks can be performed concomitantly following the latest Bing Shopping Improvements, a move which makes perfect sense, enabling users to narrow down the list of results to only those items relevant to their query.
We “added the refinements directly to the search box. Now you can select as few or as many of the refinements as you want,” Carapcea stated.
“You can see the most important and most common filters directly in the search box. If you wanted to, you could click search and immediately see the results for shoes.”
The old school filters continue to be available in the left hand side pane, but there’s no need to re-select them if they have already been used as refinement options via the search box.
Since shoppers hunt for special deals as often as possible, a new filter available in Bing Shopping now allows them to save more money.
“Now when you search for products on the site, if a discounted price is available, you will see it next to the listing. To help you find deals, we added a ‘price reduced’ filter under the price refinement allowing you to quickly filter results to only show the products with price reductions,” Carapcea added.
And since Bing is leader when it comes down to social networking features, no new Bing Shopping evolutionary step can be complete without closing the gap between users and their friends even more.
Shoppers can create multiple lists, share them on Facebook and get insight from their friends on the items they should buy.
“To help figure out which item to buy, you can share any of your lists with your Facebook friends to get their help in making a decision. Additionally, you can now select a subset of people to share your list with. Instead of broadcasting to your entire network, you can click the lock button and get feedback from a select few,” Carapcea noted.