LONDON, October 2026. Bing Digital, the ecommerce and digital agency behind online stores for Herman Miller, Hackett London, Seiko and Grenade, is advising retailers to rethink how they choose and run their trading platforms.

The agency's view is simple. A growing share of product discovery now starts inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI results and marketplace feeds, often before a shopper ever reaches a storefront. Brands that pick a platform for its themes and templates, rather than the quality of the data it can expose, are building for a shrinking slice of the buying journey.

Platform choice is now a data decision

Bing Digital has spent more than two decades building and supporting stores on the main commerce platforms. Its Shopify Plus agency work covers new builds and migrations from older systems, while its Magento and Adobe Commerce development team supports larger catalogues and complex B2B trading.

The agency argues that the right choice depends less on the platform badge and more on how cleanly it publishes structured product data, stock and pricing to the channels where buying decisions now happen. Before any rebuild, it recommends an independent ecommerce consultation to test the platform against commercial goals rather than feature lists.

Search visibility has moved into the answer

Traditional rankings still matter, and Bing Digital continues to run ecommerce SEO for retailers in the UK, Europe, the Middle East and North America. But the agency now treats answer engine optimisation as a separate discipline: making sure a brand's products are the ones AI assistants name, describe and recommend.

The same thinking applies to paid media. With AI assistants beginning to sell advertising beneath their answers, the agency's PPC management team is measuring return on ad spend across Google, Meta and newer answer-based placements side by side.

The work behind the storefront

Most of the commercial gains, the agency says, come from work customers never see. Its developers build system integrations that connect ERPs, CRMs, PIMs and warehouses, so product and stock data stays accurate wherever it is published. On the storefront itself, conversion rate optimisation closes the gap between traffic and revenue.

Clients typically stay on an ongoing support retainer after launch. Bing Digital's average client partnership runs for more than eight years.

Jon Billingsley, founder of Bing Digital, said: "For twenty years the question was which platform makes the best-looking store. That question is now secondary. Your shop is being read by assistants and marketplaces before a customer sees it, so the platform has to publish clean, complete product data everywhere it is needed. We are telling clients to fix the data and the integrations first, then worry about the theme."

He added: "Brands do not need to rip everything out. Most can get there with a proper audit, a few targeted integrations and a search strategy that covers AI answers as well as Google."

Retailers can book a website audit or speak to the team through bingdigital.com.

Notes to editors: about Bing Digital

Founded in 1999, Bing Digital is an ecommerce and digital agency headquartered in London, with offices in Dubai and Los Angeles. It designs, builds and grows online stores on Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce and Webflow, and develops custom platforms in Laravel. Clients include Herman Miller, Hackett London, Seiko, Grenade, McAfee and Pepe Jeans.

Media contact

Bing Digital, 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE

Telephone: 020 4592 0273

Email: hello@bingdigital.co.uk