Personal Shopping Assistant

If you shop online for products, you probably end up with a lot of open tabs on your browser, trying to compare sites to find the best deals. With Personal Shopping Assistant, you can bridge web, mobile and in-store shopping journeys into one fluid experience. This tool acts as a digital memory for online research, which can go on for days and weeks. It keeps track of product pages on different sites, and makes it easy to set up comparisons between them.

Since the project first released with the Garage in June 2016, the team behind the project has relentlessly sought to improve and innovate on what started as a simple shopping comparison add-in. From the project launch as a single Chrome extension, they have built for each major browser, created a bot for Facebook Messenger and a first-party Cortana skill.

Anand Sampathkumaran is on the Bing Ads team with the extension’s other creators, Gagan Chopra and Gaurav Jain. They used to run marketplace for Bing Ads, where they picked up experience with algorithms, matching and ranking. Sampathkumaran and his team started looking at browser data on shopping experiences, particularly those shopping for laptops. Their shopping journeys lasted weeks and weeks, as they kept going back to a few products over and over again.

“The Eureka moment is when we realized people have a basket of about 10 products in their head and we could help them make better decisions,” Sampathkumaran says. “We didn’t want them to leave the browser, so we gave them a comparison tool across sellers to see product pages side by side.”

“We launched a quest for personalization of Bing Ads results in 2015,” says Chopra. “As the very first thing as part of this quest, we learned how to observe people, so they get more satisfaction for what they do. We saw how the dots were connecting.”

Sampathkumaran thinks that one of this personal assistant’s biggest features is that it automatically remembers products, key details about it (such as the price) and where users saw it. These automatic captures can be favorited later. The team also found through their user studies that people wanted recommendations on other places to buy items they were interested in – and it’s worked, saving users hundreds of dollars.

“Seeing some of the projects The Garage has done gave us confidence to decisions we were making along the way. With the Garage, we can try things in the market under the Microsoft umbrella, without an existing brand,” Chopra says. “There’s also now more openness and willingness to allow small groups to work together and use open source tools and platforms. With fewer resources, we can do more. Garage facilitates that. We can take something from end to end without requiring resources across the organization.”

“We embarked on this project three years ago, and when we talked to the Garage two years ago, we found a home,” Sampathkumaran adds. “We are completely aligned with Garage’s consumer-centric strategy.”

A major update for Personal Shopping Assistant was released through Garage in June 2017 as the anniversary update. And they aren’t resting on their laurels. Chopra, Jain and Sampathkumaran are continuing to invest in Personal Shopping Assistant, and we can’t wait to see what their next move is.