MSN Shopping Beta Launched

MSN has updated its MSN Shopping test site. It looks good with a clean and quite simple user interface, and plenty of options.

According to Brian Smith at ComparisonEngines.com, MSN Shopping Beta has increased the number of stores and items significantly. The site is partly based on data from Pricegrabber.com, and partly on data collected by MSN itself.

How to use MSN Shopping

A lot of changes have been made to MSN Shopping to make the site faster and easier to use. If you know what you're looking for, you type the product name, brand, or category into the search box. If you want to browse the site, you can click on "More" in the menu bar at the top of the page to access a list of the different departments.

You can choose to search product collections by brand, price, and features. The new refinement options presents you with a list of which categories that has matches to your query so that you easier can choose the right one.

Then, use the drop down filter to sort by most popular, highest rated, price, highest user rating, and more.

MSN Shopping Beta will also let you compare prices and read ratings and reviews to help you select just the product you want.

Alternative Shopping Search Engines

The number of shopping search services keeps increasing as online shopping grows in popularity.

Google's Froogle is still in Beta, after 3 years (!). It has Google's very simple user interface on the front page, but the search results are presented in a cluttered list that is not easy to sort out.

Yahoo! Has Yahoo! Shopping which is less cluttered than the Yahoo! Home page, but still not easy to navigate.

In Europe Yahoo! owns a much better shopping search engine, namely Kelkoo. Kelkoo offers localized versions in 10 countries. We do enjoy Kelkoo's simple search field and the directory interface with its little icons.

Shopping.com should also be mentions. This well known site has versions for the UK, USA, and France. The site has a sleek look and is quite easy to use.

What will MSN Shopping contribute to the world of online shopping?

Given that there are many comparison shopping tools to choose from already, MSN's alternative may not be an important addition for the online shopper at the moment. But it is important to Microsoft, who needs to add this type of service to their MSN "family".

Once again, Microsoft is not the first to offer a service, or even the second or third. But when they do come around, they often deliver a solid products. Who knows, when this site comes out of beta, it might provide features and innovations that put it ahead in the race.

See also: Drive Holiday Sales With Search Engine Marketing

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