SMB Tech Roll-up: Microsoft Gives SMBs Some Bing, But Google Offers Places to Go

By David Roe (@druadh20) Apr 14, 2011

This week the battle for the hearts and pockets of SMBs between Microsoft and Google continues with Microsoft offering Bing marketing for SMBs and Google upgrading its Places. SAP offers businesses that want it a cheap way of doing e-commerce, while new research shows that many SMBs are not ready for web traffic spikes.

Microsoft Offers Bing

There’s nothing like a Microsoft-Google tit-for-tat in the SMB space and that’s just what we have here this week. The first piece of news comes from Microsoft, which appears to have been looking at Google Places and decided to do one of its own. Obviously, because it’s Microsoft, it had to be around Bing.

This came in the shape of a new Business Portal, which is still in beta, but which you can still have a look at, offering SMBs a way of promoting themselves on Bing, in much the same way they might if they had signed up with Google Places.

With the new Bing Business Portal, SMBs can enhance their listing on Bing, giving them a chance to push themselves in their own locality to Bing users.

It replaces the existing Bing Local List Center and promises business that, by using it, they will be able to more easily update their business listing as needed through a “select key search” category, which SMBs will populate depending on where they want their listing to appear.

In addition, the listings don’t have to be standalone and can be linked to social media applications such as Twitter and Facebook pages and can offer customized content that can be promoted on Bing PC, Bing Mobile and Facebook.

There’s no sign of pricing anywhere, but if it is taking Google Places into account, it probably won’t be a lot. If you’re interested in more, take a look.

Google Upgrades Places

Ok, so that’s the Microsoft side. However, on the Google side — and this doesn’t look even the smallest bit sneaky — it announced that it was updating Places, in the days just before Microsoft did its Bing thing.

According to Google’s blog post, Google has added Local Product Availability on Google Place Pages that brings your offline catalog to the web and lets customers have a look at your wares before they have any contact with the business.

It does this with the addition of a section called "Popular products available at this store" that enables businesses to list five popular products, as well as their pricing and availability. Customers can also search by specific items to see if a particular item is in stock nearby.

To display local product availability on your Google Place page, users first share local availability data with Google through a Merchant Center account and then set up a Google Place page, if there isn’t one already.

While this may, as Google says, stop the heartache of having to drive around on a Saturday looking for suitable outlets, the fact that it makes shopping a whole lot easier, and SMBs a lot more productive with their marketing budgets, probably won’t endear them to anyone over at Bing.

Cheap E-Commerce for SMBs from SAP

Meanwhile, SAP (news, site) marks another milestone in its product road map for on-demand applications that add to customers’ on-premise software installations.