November 6, 2006

Windows Live Product Upload Released

LiveSide.Net reports that Microsoft launched Live Product Upload over the weekend. The tool that allows catalogers to upload their products to the Windows Live Product Search database. LiveSide that this feature "guarantees their inclusion in the Live Search extension."

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:56 AM | Permalink

May 24, 2006

Microsoft Talks Shopping

Last week I briefly introduced three of Microsoft's e-commerce initiatives: MSN Shopping, Windows Live Shopping, and Windows Live Product Search. This week I talked with Jim Barr, GM of Microsoft's Shopping and Marketplaces group for a little more insight.

Here's an excerpt: Search is very important. Half of the shopping starts in search. 15-25% of all searches go to a shopping site. MSN search will not win unless we are good at commerce search. Thats a strong reason why we invested.

Windows Live Product Search goes on the presumption that the audience wants to see as much selection as possible. We crawl the web for everything out there. Were starting with a philosophy that people should be able to search for tail items.

Eventually we want to apply as many ways to go from a long list of whats available to a short list of whats right for you. We have our goals in mind [to match buyers and sellers] and we want to do whats right for users.

May 19, 2006

Guide To Microsoft's Many Shopping Search Sites

This is a long overdue post to clear up confusion around Microsoft's multiple shopping sites which include MSN Shopping, Windows Live Shopping Beta, and Windows Live Product Search Beta. The Marketplaces & Shopping team at Microsoft also runs Windows Marketplace and Windows Live Expo but in this post, I'm just covering the general ecommerce initiatives.

MSN Shopping = Microsoft's core shopping comparison engine. MSN Shopping covers over 7,000 merchants and 33 million products. The beauty of a shopping comparison engine like MSN Shopping is in its ability to normalize product pages - put simply, item clustering (I'm borrowing that term from Imran Aziz, Lead Program Manager Windows Live Product Search Beta), the ability to put all merchant offers for a particular product on a single page. MSN Shopping works off of very structured product data provided by Shopping.com and PriceGrabber.

Windows Live Shopping = The Web 2.0 version of MSN Shopping. Windows Live Shopping does not work with FireFox, although that will be taken care of soon. As MSN Shopping Program Manager Ian McAllister wrote on his blog, "[this] 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."

This is an incredible improvement over MSN Shopping. Great user interface, cool features and tools. Windows Live Shopping really puts the consumer first and is an exciting example of the new types of services Microsoft is developing

Windows Live Product Search = Microsoft's shopping search engine. A shopping search engine differs from a shopping comparison engine in that it does not depend on merchants submitting data feeds, but rather crawls the web for merchants. Because of this, Windows Live Product Search covers over 100,000 merchants (a lot more than the 7,000 or so covered on MSN Shopping and Windows Live Shopping). A comprehensive experience is a great start, but I think we're too early in the game to understand the implication of this new search offering.

While there are obviously big improvements in comprehensiveness, Windows Live Product Search users will notice that there aren't normalized product pages (item clustering) in the traditional shopping comparison engine sense and merchant reveiws are a no show. According to the Product Search blog, though, these features are on the way.

Posted by Brian Smith at 2:55 PM | Permalink

May 5, 2006

Windows Live Product Search: For Sellers & Buyers

Microsoft announced the launch of Windows Live Product Search. From the looks of it, the service seems a lot like Google Base and eBay. The description from the announcement says that this service allows people "to find products available on the internet for sale." So it is not exactly like Windows Live Shopping, which launched May 1st, which only includes products from select merchants (who submit products to them). As an FYI, Google's Froogle also crawls the Web for products, but they also enable merchants to submit products via feed. We may have more on this next week.

Postscript: TechCrunch has a nice review on the release, and names Windows Live Product Search a Froogle Competitor.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 3:08 PM | Permalink

May 1, 2006

Microsoft Launches Windows Live Shopping Beta

Microsoft announced Friday that they have launched Windows Live Shopping in beta, it only works on Internet Explorer for Windows. It runs on AJAX, making it Web 2.0 :), but you can drag and drop, share items with "friends," and review and create reviews.

Conducting a search on lcd tv brought up a very nice interface. Since I just bought one for my new home, I wanted to see what they had to offer. You can quickly (well, it doesn't run too quickly) narrow your search by screen size, aspect ratio, price range, brand and seller, all excellent filter options. After you filter your search, you can then sort by "best match," "popularity," "price," and "rating." In addition, they have this little slider where you can change the search results display from list view with or without pictures or simply picture view. You can also add products to your "shopping list" or to "compare list." They also have all the standards you would expect from a shopping search engine.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:59 AM | Permalink

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