Developer(s) Microsoft Type Search Engine | Stable release Final / June 3, 2010 | |
 | ||
Website | ||
Bing Shopping (formerly MSN Shopping, Windows Live Shopping, Live Search Products and Windows Live Product Search) was a products search service and part of Microsoft's Bing search engine, discontinued around October 1, 2013. It was customised for finding products available for sale on the web. The results provided information such as product pictures, pricing, and description. These products could be indexed by crawling the web and extracting rich meta-data from web pages.
Contents
History
Windows Live Shopping was originally launched in Beta form as part of Microsoft's Windows Live suite. It was built entirely on AJAX technology and had many social and community features. In addition to a retail shopping website, it featured drag-and-drop items to a shopping list, share lists with other users, product and seller reviews, public shopping guides with Windows Live Shopping Guides and an enhanced preview.
On February 20, 2007, Windows Live Shopping beta was rebranded as MSN Shopping. Part of the reason for this decision was to reduce the number of shopping services Microsoft offered, which included MSN Shopping, Windows Live Expo and Live Product Search. Microsoft's spokesperson stated that the beta testing was intended to obtain an insight into user behavior and the data would be incorporated into plans for future products. It was stated that user-created content from Windows Live Shopping beta (lists, guides, and reviews) would continue to be available on MSN Shopping. Windows Live Shopping Guides was discontinued as part of the rebranding.
As MSN Shopping, the service aggregated millions of product offers from thousands of retailers, allowing users to search or browse for products. Searches could be sorted by relevance, popularity or by price (either ascending or descending). Refinements were available to allow the user to narrow the results set.
Cashback program
The Bing Cashback program was a rebate program launched on May 22, 2008 (Live Search Cashback) that allowed users to search for products from multiple vendors and find their prices and offering money back for purchases made through the site.
The cashback service started in June 2006 as part of Jellyfish.com. On October 2, 2007, Microsoft announced the purchase of Jellyfish.com with an estimated price of $50 million. Microsoft intended to use the Jellyfish engine as part of their Live Search services in attempt to catch up to Google in the search market.
The cashback portion of Jellyfish.com was integrated with Bing (then Live Search) and officially announced on May 22, 2008. From December 1, 2008, Bing Cashback began offering users to receive cashbacks instantly, instead of having to wait for 60 days. This feature only worked in conjunction with eBay.
On April 14, 2009, Microsoft officially merged Cashback with the then Live Search Products. On June 3, 2009, as part of the rebrand from Live Search to Bing, the service was renamed "Bing Cashback". On June 4, 2010, Microsoft announced that Bing Cashback would be retired on July 30, 2010 due to lack of interest.
Product catalog upload
Microsoft used to run a Product Upload program to encourage merchants interested in making their product catalog available in Bing Product Upload to be uploaded and indexed for the service. However, this service was discontinued on May 15, 2009.