Following this week’s availability of the anticipated Windows 10 platform (albeit not in mobile guise), Microsoft elaborated on some of the upgrades it has planned for the new Windows store for both developers and customers.

The company is unifying its mobile and desktop stores as part of the new look Windows Store, underpinned by its drive for universal apps which will run on a number of devices. Todd Brix, Microsoft’s app store chief, also noted the availability of tools intended to enable developers to reuse code from other platforms to create Windows 10 apps.

“Not only do we want to make it easy to bring apps and games to Windows, but we designed the Store experience to get those apps discovered and increase revenue opportunities,” he wrote.

In a blog post, Bernardo Zamora, product manager for the Windows App and Store team said the store “has been built from the ground up for Windows 10”, and its new approach includes updates to lists and search algorithms, changes to app listings and updates to ratings and reviews.

Zamora added that the store will be able to accommodate a wide variety of content, including applications, games, music, video and TV, while the company plans to make other content streams accessible in the future.

Windows 10 will adopt new algorithms to determine search results, which will have an impact on how store lists are shown and search results are returned.

These search algorithms will be optimised for applications, games, movies and music, rather than a ubiquitous web search. Store lists will also always show apps first, and factor in attributes such as click through rates, ratings and reviews, keywords and downloads.

Application lists embodied in the new look store will now include ‘top free,’ ‘top paid,’ ‘best rated’ and ‘new and rising.’ The ‘top grossing’ category will be removed, and it will also become temporarily unavailable on Windows 8.

To help mitigate the impact of ranking changes in store lists and search results for developers, Zamora said they should “evaluate app descriptions and keywords to ensure they are optimised for the lists and search results you’d like your app to appear in”.

“Irrelevant keywords can hurt your app’s ratings as algorithms detect inaccurate keywords, meaning the app could potentially drop in rankings.”

The integration of Windows and Windows phone apps also means the product description pages will see several changes.

Brix also reiterated that later this year, PC and tablet customers will be able to pay for products using operator billing, which is already available for Windows Phone customers via 100 operators across 57 markets.