Bing Shopping, the comparison shopping tool that is part of Microsoft’s new search engine, saw some impressive growth last month. According to Hitwise’s Heather Dougherty, visits to Bing Shopping increased 169% last month and Bing is now the 4th most popular shopping comparison site in the US. Just last month, Bing was still in 8th place. Clearly, Microsoft’s marketing muscle behind Bing.com and consumer interest in Microsoft’s Double Cashback promotion brought a lot of new users to Bing Shopping in June.

According to Hitwise, about one third of all the visitors to Bing Shopping came from Bing.com and MSN. What is interesting, is that Hitwise found that 66% of the visitors who came from Bing and 50% of those who came from MSN hadn’t been to Bing Shopping in the last 30 days. Given that Bing is only now getting on a lot of consumers’ radar, these numbers make a lot of sense.
Given this growth for Bing Shopping, it doesn’t come as a surprise that most of Bing’s competitors lost some market share during the last month. All of the top 3 shopping tools (Yahoo Shopping, Bizrate, and Shopzilla) lost between 2% and 5%.
