The New Bing Shopping – A 30-Day Pre/Post Transition Comparison

Cashback Flashback

It’s been just over 30 days now since Microsoft shut down its Bing Cashback program which encouraged consumers to purchase items from participating merchants, who in turn would provide them with rebates of varying percentages anywhere from 2% to as high as 40%.

Fast forward to today and Bing Cashback has returned as Bing Shopping. This time they’ve come back as a free comparison shopping engine similar to Google Product Search. Currently they allow  all merchants who qualify to list their products without having to pay a commission to users.

For this post we have gathered data from our own merchants comparing their Bing Cashback performances 30-days prior to the Cashback program shutting down, and comparing them to how the post 30-days have fared for them.

The data we used was provided via our internal tracking systems, comparing the period of July 1 – July 30 to Aug 1 – Aug 30.

July 31st was skipped since that was the final day of Bing Cashback and served as a transition period. Here’s what we found:

When we summed up the traffic totals for all clients in this study, the aggregate numbers saw a drop off of 5.58%.

A drop off was to be expected for two main reasons:

• the new Bing Shopping campaign opened the doors for more merchants to sign up, so current merchants on Bing had to begin competing with more merchants with similar inventory than them, thus shrinking the size of the pie that a merchant previously had.
• without the benefit of receiving a percentage of their order back, consumers may have shied away from using Bing Shopping, since for them the incentive of using Bing Shopping as opposed to Google Product Search or any other CSE was non-existent–they’d have to go back to paying “full” price for goods either way.

The aggregate numbers don’t tell the entire story though–we found that while nearly 2/3s of the merchants we looked at lost traffic, the other 1/3 surprisingly gained traffic.

Breaking down each merchants traffic differences ranging from drops of 68% to gains of 60%. The median drop off was nearly identical to the overall at 5.54%.

Here’s a further breakdown with quartiles (1st quartile = 25th percentile, 3rd = 75th percentile):

So certainly things were skewed in the direction of a traffic drop off, while a good number of merchants have seen traffic gains with the new Bing.

Here is the part merchants should be most concerned with. Traffic spikes don’t amount to much if none of those convert into orders, and traffic drops are irrelevant if somehow the aggregate number of orders remained constant.

Whereas we saw traffic numbers increase for nearly 1/3 of our merchants, less than 20% saw a gain in total orders. Again, here’s our breakdown:

Overall, total sales fell 58.6% when combining all sales generated by Bing.

The story gets uglier here too, as conversion rates (orders / clicks) fell across the board for every merchant whose data we gathered:

Our best merchant saw a drop off of just 3.15%–but a typical merchant saw conversion rates decrease by over 50%.

We had one outlier of a merchant who saw a decent spike in revenue, but again we see a major drop off in total revenue, given the traffic decreases, and the lower conversion rates:

The numbers above were largely to be expected once Microsoft decided to pull the plug on its program.

The minor drops in traffic along with the huge drop offs in conversions and total revenue are the direct result of additional merchants diluting the inventory on Bing Shopping, along with the lower incentive levels in using Bing as compared to any of the dozens of other CSE’s out there.

Bing’s new Shopping platform is mainly a positive for merchants who were unable to get on there previously–much like a swank private nightclub finally opening its doors to the general public. Those used to being among elite crowds are now surrounded by anyone who wants to join.

Still, the positive news for merchants who’ve been on Bing all long is that Bing as a search portal is constantly growing, which should increase the number of users that go to its Shopping platform.

Also, merchants don’t have to worry about losing access to the exclusive club anymore due to a malfunctioning pixel (which was all too common) or due to a balance left unpaid.

And finally, as a free platform there’s no need to worry about fraudulent orders from users trying to game the system (also a common issue), or do much work at all other than regularly sending out a fresh data feed to Bing.

Almost exactly a year ago Microsoft’s  double cashback program (where Microsoft matched whatever % a merchant would give) was so popular that it had to shut it down prematurely, but merchants benefited greatly from it.

We doubt we’ll see much of the same craze again this year, instead the Bing Shopping program should be a more reliable and consistent source of traffic and revenue for its merchants, without any of the headaches that Bing Cashback provided.