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August 1, 2005The New MSN ShoppingIt is official, the new MSN Shopping shopping functionality is live on http://shopping.msn.com/ Scott Austin has a long list of features at MSN Shopping Insider, Brian Smith has a nice long post at Comparison Engines, and I'm assuming the Search Engine Watch blog is going to provide background information. I'll try a different format and see if it proves useful. Here are my Top 3 most-favorite and least-favorite features of the new MSN Shopping: Pro: 1. RSS Feeds - Custom search-based feeds should be infinitely more useful than pre-defined, ill-defined category feeds (i.e. Yahoo Shopping RSS). I'm not sure how many people will discover all of the uses for this feature, but you can build a feed to include a search for a product name, a price range, product attributes, and even the sort order. Nice! 2. Recently Viewed - I like that they looked beyond just saving products, and included categories, searches and pages. 3. "Miscellaneous" - There are many improvements over the old MSN Shopping, but as a shopper who uses many comparison shopping engines, none of the other new features stand out from the pack, at this time. Con: 1. Attribute-Based Search - I admit, this is my pet peeve. In my humble opinion, MSN Shopping's goal of letting people compare products "without having to do any fancy manipulation of data" is somewhat ironic... because the only reason features like this seem fancy is because everyone is clinging to tired old interfaces. Become.com's multi-criteria search is an example of how easy this can be. Use the wrong interface, and comparing even a few attributes is a chore for the average user. Yet, even with the old-style interface, there is room for improvement, by replacing overly-narrow ranges (1.8-1.9GHz) with open-ended ranges (1.8+ GHz). 2. RSS Feeds - With so many ways to build a custom feed, this should be the greatest things since sliced bread. In reality, the content in the feeds is less than compelling. This is a problem with most shopping-related feeds... the content is sooo vague... no images, limited descriptions, no ratings, no merchants, no indication of sort order, no way to tell "which end is up" in general. 3. "The Content Area" - the site is sluggish today, images are slow to load, many products do not have images, many products are not grouped... making comparison difficult. Hopefully this is a temporary situation. + + + related links: MSN Shopping | Sitemap | Help | Feedback
The New MSN Shopping
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