Since the new MSN Shopping is now live, here’s are some thoughts on MSN’s entry into the comparison shopping arena…

This post is long, so in a nutshell:

1. I don’t currently see MSN fully behind the new MSN Shopping. There is no shopping/product tab on MSN Search and MSN Shopping is below the fold on MSN.com.
2. In a lot of ways, MSN Shopping resembles a glossy catalog or offline shopping experience, not a traditional comparison shopping engine.
3. Look for interesting opportunities around personalization. The ‘Recently Viewed’ feature is probably just the beginning.
4. There’s a lot more that MSN Shopping could do in terms of RSS feeds.

Now if you’re interested in learning more…

1. Why isn’t MSN Shopping integrated into MSN Search? All of the other top search engines have a ‘tab’ for shopping/products. Furthermore, if a user just performs a general search (not clicking on the shopping/products tab) on the top search engines, he is still presented with product results – Google lists the products at the top of the page between the Sponsored Links and the first organic results, Yahoo! does the same although it’s not very well presented, AOL lists the products at the top or bottom of the page through a module powered by Shopzilla, and Ask lists the products at the top of the page.

It seems odd that MSN Shopping is not leveraging traffic from MSN Search (even the link to MSN Shopping on MSN.com is below the fold).

There are definitely business issues to work out here. In particular, how much should MSN push a vertical shopping section when sponsored links (syndicated from YSM) through general results are a huge revenue driver? But after all the work the MSN Shopping team put into the new system, it seems a shame that the full power of MSN is not behind MSN Shopping.

2. What makes MSN Shopping unique? Merchandising. Merchandising. Merchandising. Click on ‘Shop by Color’ on the home page and you start to get an idea of what I’m talking about: MSN Shopping in a lot of ways resembles a glossy catalog. While at first I’m thinking what happened to comparison shopping, I’m soon drawn to the browsing experience that very much parallels a real world trip to the mall/department store or a flip through a catalog from a high end retailer.

This experience was duplicated in many of the Seasonal Guides and the Editors’ Picks. I looked at Backpacks & Bags (under Back-to-School) and Sunglasses Trends (under Editors’ Picks). From a traditional online comparison shopping viewpoint, these sections didn’t offer me what I expected. I can’t narrow my search by attribute, merchant, or even price (although because all of these products are ‘soft’ goods, that’s not too surprising).

While the ‘Search Shopping’ feature (general search) pushes the user into the normal comparison shopping experience, clicking on many of the categories - Beauty, Electronics, Jewelry, Home & Garden, etc., once again drops the user back into the glossy catalog.

My first instinct was to identify this as bad or good, but I decided it’s just a different shopping experience than I’m used to on the other comparison engines. With PriceGrabber powering much of the back-end in terms of price comparisons and product reviews, there are obviously a ton of items for which a user can conduct pure comparison shopping. MSN covers the basics there and will become stronger over time - right now a lot of product images are missing and a lot of products only seem to be associated with one store, which makes for a frustrating comparison shopping experience.

However, MSN Shopping has created a unique merchandising experience and has effectively brought the offline shopping experience online. In this way, MSN Shopping will be extremely attractive for many consumers (I’m especially thinking women) and advertisers.

One final note here…with all the merchandising opportunities available, I think it’s wrong to just compare MSN Shopping to pure play comparison engines. Rather, I’m starting to think that Amazon is a closer competitor.

3. Recently Viewed. This is one of the best little features I’ve seen on a comparison engine. While Become.com’s new price comparison engine allows a user to add products to a favorites list and PriceGrabber allows a user to register an account and add products to a shopping list, I like how MSN just keeps track of my browsing activity. Now I know some readers just fell over because of my lack of concern about privacy, but we all know these concerns will subside (is anyone still talking about Google Adwords next to Gmail?). Interestingly, I had to look to Amazon’s Page You Made system to find similar functionality.

So what why is this important?

As Scott Austin (Director of Programming, MSN Shopping) mentions in MSN Shopping Insider, this “personalization feature will help users have a more continuous shopping experience across sessions with recently viewed products, categories, searches and saved pages. ” Hmmm. Personalization. That’s a word that hasn’t been mentioned much in this blog. It definitely came up when I spoke with Rob Solomon of Yahoo! Shopping, but that’s about it.

Personalization in terms of shopping allows for recommendations and up-sells. As with Amazon’s shopping experience, over time, MSN Shopping could offer personalized recommendations geared towards a user’s interests. (All you people concerned with Privacy, Shush! Be more concerned with Claria and WhenU.) Personalization has the potential to make the shopping experience more valuable for all players.

4. RSS Feeds. To start, you have to understand that I consider myself just above average (compared to all other web users) when it comes to understanding and using technologies like RSS readers. I first came across shopping feeds at Yahoo! Shopping and subscribed through My Yahoo!, but quickly got bored with Yahoo! Shopping RSS Beta and unsubscribed. The problem was that the feed didn’t offer a huge added value; getting notifications about the most popular Digital Cameras was not interesting. Now I admit that some RSS shopping categories are a bit ‘cooler’ - music or movies news with associated pricing and reviews grabs my attention – but in general, these feeds aren’t very impressive.

It wasn’t until I talked with Dulance that I understood the real potential of RSS feeds in relation to comparison shopping. While Dulance’s ‘Search the Future’ isn’t perfect, it provides me with an incredibly valuable tool. As opposed to a feed of the most popular digital cameras (ala MSN Shopping or Yahoo! Shopping), on Dulance, I can subscribe to a feed which alerts me when a particular digital camera is in a specified price range…as opposed to having to constantly check prices, Dulance brings this information to me automatically, saving me time and money.

I think that all comparison engines will integrate this type of technology in the near future, and I’m surprised that MSN Shopping missed the boat here. MSN Shopping allows me to easily subscribe to feeds which offer general information. I’m sure many people will subscribe to the top digital cameras or beauty products feeds, but IMHO there’s not much value here. MSN Shopping also lets me drill down by attribute and subscribe to more specific product feeds (Digital Cameras with 3 – 3.9 Megapixels, $230 - $240) which is a bit more valuable. However, I can’t get a feed on a specific product and therefore get an alert when the price drops to a certain level. Dulance’s RSS Shopping tool, on the other hand, has this functionality.