Recently, Microsoft unveiled their new search engine – Bing.com.  Actually, they prefer to call Bing a “decision engine.”  It’s designed to help visitors weed through all the search overload that other engines give you, and help you make real decisions about what your searching for.  They have designed Bing with three goals in mind, to “deliver great results; deliver a more organized experience; and simplify tasks and provide insight, leading to faster, more confident decisions.”

Early indications show that most people are having positive experiences with Bing, and Microsoft is using an almost $100 million advertising campaign to promote it’s rebranded search engine as well.  So how can you, as an ecommerce professional, take advantage of this new source of visitors and potential sales?

First, test out Bing for yourself.  And don’t just do a one-time search for some random item like shoes or your name.  Instead, make it your default search engine for a while.  Get accustomed to some of the useful features like refined categories and related topics on the left-hand navigation plain.  Bing also does a great job with integrating shopping results and local retailers in your area.  The idea is to get used to how people will use it and hopefully find your website.

Next, make sure your website is listed using their Webmaster Central tools.  If you have a physical location for your business, get your information listed on their Local Listing Center.  And if you want even more exposure, directly upload your products for free with Product Upload.  Microsoft also has a pay-per-click program called adCenter, which they have also made improvements to.

Bing’s initial rise to #2 was probably from the hype and introduction, so only time will tell if they can sustain any growth.  They may not take down the all-powerful Google, but they could certainly lower it’s market share.  With a good redesign and early positive experiences, it looks like Microsoft has finally found a worthy competitor.

A couple of days ago I mentioned that I wanted to share our new sites with you. We get to work on a lot of sites at MightyMerchant, and these great sites deserve a little exposure (and link love!) when they’re just getting started. This one, IsleOfSkyeBagpipes.com, went live on November 5.

The challenge for this site was to provide the many options that Isle Of Skye needed their customers to be able to select. MightyMerchant has a feature called “shared options,” which allows add-on choices. For Isle Of Skye, the options are a little more complicated, as some of them affect the price of the product and some do not. This is an important feature that many ecommerce merchants really need! In this example, in the drop down selection boxes you can see that some choices add on to the cost:

Shared options goes one step further so that the customer could create groups of options that he will use over and over. For instance, if all of the bagpipes share the same Mouth Piece and Tuning Slide options, he can just select to use that Shared option group, rather than having to enter those choices for each product individually.

The couple who started Isle Of Sky Bagpipes, Mike and Sarah, are passionate about sharing their love of bagpipes and offering quality bagpipe merchandise. Mike has been the Director of Piping at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota since 1999. It’s great to have you aboard, Mike and Sarah!

Tags: website, design