Below I explain the difference between MSN’s multiple commerce offerings. MSN Shopping, Windows Live Shopping, and Windows Live Product Search. I’m only really scratching the surface here, so stay tuned for a lot more information.

MSN Shopping = MSN’s core shopping comparison engine offering.
-With the help of PriceGrabber and Shopping.com listings, MSN Shopping covers over 7,000 merchants and 33m products. Merchants can also get on MSN Shopping through graphical advertising. The new MSN Shopping launched July 15, 2005. Read my interview with Chris Jolley, former Group Manager for MSN Shopping, for the original vision. While there’s serious technology behind the site, I’ve focused my coverage of MSN Shopping on the glossy catalog look and feel of the site. And that makes sense as the demographics show that the site is heavily skewed female (75% female, 25% male). I’m not a technologist, so MSN Shopping has been easier for me to grok in a lot of ways. I think the human touch (editorial picks, seasonal shopping, MERCHANDISING, etc.) adds a ton of value to the site.

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Windows Live Shopping = The web 2.0 version of MSN Shopping.
-Not available in Firefox. Odd, I’d think that if you’re building a web 2.0 application it needs to be launched in Firefox. Ok, this is MisterSoftee, so maybe not. Anyways, as the MSN Shopping Insider blog explains:

It is the beta launch of Microsoft’s Web 2.0 shopping experience, featuring one of the world’s largest product catalogs, user-created content and an easier-to-use interface built on 100% AJAX technology. Results are displayed in an order that is not affected by advertising; merchants cannot pay to have their items show up closer to the top. Users will be able to drag-and-drop items to a shopping list and share lists with friends; see user reviews of products and sellers; and read and create public shopping guides on any subject.

What is our vision? In the future, Windows Live Shopping will continue to offer the great comparison shopping services you see today, while also integrating more social and community features that will enable users to better research, share, and have fun with their shopping experiences. AJAX will allow us to execute against this vision with a rich user interface that is modularized to capitalize on the gadgets craze.

In other words, the cooler version of MSN Shopping. But it still doesn’t support Firefox.

As Ian McAllister writes in his blog:

That was arguably the first experience within the Shopping team in developing a truly loosely-coupled service. It prompted what you might call a services tidal wave within our team that pre-dated Ray Ozzie’s mail by a few months. Literally three-quarters of the development team went off and worked on a host of different services using the agile method and for the most part, operating independently of the other teams. The cornerstone of our web service platform is the set of core shopping web services that expose the product catalog, attribute refinements, compare and other functionality. Other services include ratings & reviews, wish list and guides.

Windows Live Shopping is essentially a mashup of those services. The great thing is that since the services are not baked into the platform we can expose them outside of shopping to the rest of live.com land and perhaps…to the public.

Once you get running with IE (I upgraded to IE 7.0 Beta 2 SP2 which means I can no longer use Yahoo! Mail Beta), Windows Live Shopping is pretty cool. I wouldn’t go back to MSN Shopping. I need to do a full review, but the special functionality includes drag and drop shopping lists (very smooth), shopping guides (Yahoo! Shoposphere’s Pick Lists and ShopWiki’s Wiki Buying Guides better watch out), and product attribute comparison (easily grab a couple items you like and hit ‘compare’). Great user interface advances. It might take a little while for a newbie to get used to, but Windows Live Shopping is a huge leap forward for the MSN Marketplaces group.

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Windows Live Product Search = Microsoft’s Shopping Search Engine.
A shopping search engine crawls the web for merchant and product data. A traditional shopping comparison engine is based on merchant data feeds. I’ve talked about shopping search in reference to Dulance, ShopWiki, and Pronto. Yahoo! Shopping and Shopzilla also crawl the web for products, although it’s unclear to what extent.

Shopping search in theory makes complete sense to me. If only 10,000 companies are submitting product data feeds (maybe 50k for Froogle), then shopping comparison engines are missing out on at least 90% of the stores on the web (most companies I’ve talked to agree that there are over 120,000 e-commerce enabled merchants online). Put very simply, shopping search should provide a much more comprehensive shopping experience. For instance, yesterday I was in the Dallas Fort Worth Airport (DFW) and Duran Duran’s Hungry Like a Wolf was playing (why don’t SFO, SJC and JFK play music like that?). Searching for ‘duran duran shirt’ on Windows Live Product Search returned 16 results, 11 of which actually turned out to be relevant.

-Performing the same search on NexTag returned no results.
-Performing the same search on Shopping.com returned no results.
-Performing the same search on PriceGrabber returned no results.
-Performing the same search on Shopzilla returned 1 listing.
-Performing the same search on Froogle returned 134 results. Great at first glance…as you click through the results, though, the results are mostly eBay listings and there are a ton of CDs (not shirts) mixed into the results. Still, a much better experience than on most of the shopping comparison engines. The power of eBay. Maybe Shopping.com should add more than a below the fold ’search on eBay’ link.
-Performing the same search on ShopWiki returned 33 results. The first 7 listings are very relevant. Most of the remaining results list shirts for bands like Spinal Tap, AC/DC, Slash, and Neil Young. Not exactly Duran Duran.

As you can see, shopping search sites like Windows Live Product Search and Shopwiki are more comprehensive than some traditional shopping comparison engines. Also, Froogle, with an eBay feed returns a good amount of results.

That’s not to say that Windows Live Product Search is perfect. Far from it. One great benefit of shopping comparison engines is that the merchant must take the time and effort to educate the engine through a data feed. Because of this, more and more results on shopping comparison engines are normalized/standardized. As Shopping.com has explained, the more normalized a product category, the better the conversion rate for the products in that category. A normalized product page on Shopping.com will show the consumer one product and all the merchants thay sell that particular product. This is very difficult to do without a data feed and therefore, at this point, shopping search engines return results that look much more like general Google or Yahoo! search results. Not everyone will be comfortable shopping in this manner.

There are many other differences between shopping search engines and shopping comparison engines, but the blatant one at this point from a consumer facing point of view when looking at Windows Live Product Search is that there are no merchant ratings. Buyer beware. Just because a merchant is included in the index doesn’t mean that it’s a legitimate merchant. While there’s no guarantee on a site like PriceGrabber either, at least PriceGrabber takes the time to review merchants and has processes set up to protect consumers (more on this in another post).

The Windows Live Product Search Beta blog explains the vision behind the site:

At beta, the index will contain products from over 100,000 sellers and this number will continue to grow over time. The project started with the premise of enabling small businesses to be well represented in the index and to enable users to find hard-to-find and unique items. Working with Microsoft Research enabled us to productize the core technology which can algorithmically classify and extract product information from numerous online web sites. It is interesting to note that in addition to indexing products such as toaster ovens and chai tea, the system also indexes commercial offers for vacation rentals to automobiles.

Related Posts:
Former DoubleClick Execs Launch ShopWiki - April 19, 2006
Dulance Not Dead? Dulance And Google? - April 12, 2006
InterActive Corporation’s (IACI) Pronto - April 4, 2006
Dulance - We hardly knew you - March 29, 2006
Dulance - The Long Tail - What Happens When You Move Past Feeds - July 20, 2005