Microsoft Bing Edge Shopping Reinvented. What?

November 24, 2020

I read “Reinventing Online Shopping on Microsoft Edge.” I like the word “reinventing.” It implies that online shopping is not using Amazon.com. Much to Google’s chagrin, the Bezos bulldozer has become the number one destination for those in the lower 48 who are looking for products. Six out of 10 shopping “journeys” begin online, according to Sleeknote. The same outfit reports that nearly half of US online commerce sales end up at Amazon. An outfit called Moz reports:

With 54 percent of product searches now taking place on Amazon, it’s time to take it seriously as the world’s largest search engine for e-commerce. In fact, if we exclude YouTube as part of Google, Amazon is technically the second largest search engine in the world.

So what about shopping on Microsoft Edge?

I ran this query on Microsoft Edge for AMZ 5700 video card. Here’s what I saw on November 22, 2020:

I ran the same query on Firefox. Here’s what I saw:

Both are different. The write up about reinventing shopping asserts that there are true blue, accidental, and incidental shoppers. That’s MBA think in action. The write up continues:

we [Microsoft] came up with a native-to-browser design framework that tailors shopping assistance to prioritize different information depending on the shopper’s stage in their journey. We determine what stage a person is at based on what kind of page they’re on.

Microsoft points out:

As you design your experiences, think about relying on a consistent UI paradigm that is both familiar and always available to the user. In our case, the UI framework leverages the URL bar, or address bar, in Edge as a quick one-touch anchor for shopping assistance. The URL bar is where people expect things relevant to the current webpage to show up — and we are extending the same model to surface optimized shopping insights. [Emphasis added]

I want to point out:

I see two different user interfaces: One looks like a Google jumble and the other looks like eBay
I don’t look for shopping information in the url bar. The url bar is where I want to see — wait for it, please — the url
Neither interface benefits from little pictures. I am searching for a specific thing and I want a link to a relevant page, not a jazzed up “report.”

Amazon’s shopping is certainly not perfect, but I don’t have to figure out why the display looks different in different browsers or what’s is available.

MBA alert: Amazon and Google have much more traffic than Bing when it comes to shopping. You can check your traffic data for verification, not look in the url bar for an experience. This reality check will verify that blue is the sadness of shopping data analysis, the accidental weirdness Microsoft result pages present to a human shopper, and the incidental effort varying graphical interfaces display.

Stephen E Arnold, November 23, 2020

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Microsoft, News, Search

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.