Microsoft has announced a partnership with Shopify in a deal that’ll help the tech giant to expand product selection across its own search engine Microsoft Bing and within the shopping tab available on its Microsoft Edge browser and its recently launched Microsoft Start news platform. The deal is similar to what Google unveiled with Shopify earlier this year. The Google-Shopify deal gave the e-Commerce platform merchants the ability to reach new and potential consumers through Google Search services and other relevant/related services.
Shopify merchants will have access to the integration through an updated Microsoft Channel app. With this, they can be able to make whatever adjustment that they need to so that they can expand their reach across Microsoft’s chain of apps/network. According to Microsoft, once the aforementioned has been done, merchants products will be displayed across the shopping tab in Bing, Microsoft Edge and Microsoft Start as free products listings.
Microsoft’s advertising revenues, like Google’s, may be impacted by Amazon’s growing ads business over time. Google, as a way of mitigating this challenge, revamped its Google Shopping service. The tech company presented this in a pitch it shared with online advertisers during its Google I/O developer conference. This change has driven an increase of more than 80 percent in merchants on Google’s platform(s). Last year, Google made it free for merchants to sell their products across its platforms and this has encouraged many small to medium scale businesses to join the train.
Although Microsoft has been witnessing growth in its search advertising revenue in recent times following the rebound of the ad market, Amazon still has the upper hand and the partnership with Shopify is a way to increase its search advertising revenue.
Merchants stand to gain quite a lot from the partnership between Shopify and Microsoft. Shopify’s integration will enable these merchants to be able to come up with new ad campaigns and keep track of marketing performance in real-time on their Shopify store, Microsoft confirmed. Merchants also stand to benefit from other imminent shopping enhancements that the partnership will bring in the future.
