The Windows Live Shopping website is now available online, just in time for Mother’s Day holiday shopping.
Any possible comparison to Amazon.com may be ended now, since Shopping Live only supports the Internet Explorer browser. While that discounts a vocal minority of alternative browser users, IE does have about 86 percent market share globally.
And besides, Shopping Live draws listings from the Amazon.com Marketplace, among many other locations.
The Shopping Live team posted more details about the beta launch of the site on their blog. They call it “Microsoft’s Web 2.0 shopping experience.
The “experience” includes a 100 percent Ajax technology interface, which includes drag-and-drop shopping lists. Shopping Live can search or browse almost 40 million products from 7,000 stores; those include eBay as well as big name retailers.
Also, the post noted that the item display is not ordered by advertising, nor can a retailer pay for moving their items up the display list. On the social side, visitors can share the shopping lists they create with others and create shopping guides on subjects for others to use.
Their post also called the enhanced preview a cool feature. Mousing over a picture of one of the Deals du Jour on the main page renders that enhanced preview with more product details. This appears to be a bit buggy in IE 6, as the three completely different items at the bottom of the Deal block display the enhanced preview for the item above them, as observed at press time.
A quick search for “Rough Guide USA” returned 10 results for that title. The last release of that title, the 7th version, appeared, along with the 3rd, 4th, and 5th editions. Another result was for the Rough Guide to Turkey, an interesting destination despite the Turquoise Coast being a little difficult for the typical American family to reach by car during summer vacation.
The searcher can filter results by a particular seller. In our example, booksellers like Barnes & Noble and Alibris showed up, as did Wal-Mart.com and Amazon’s Marketplace. Clicking on the Sellers link under a title brings up a list of sellers with that book. The list can be sorted by user rating, price, or condition.
More social and community features have been promised for future releases of Shopping Live. Browser compatibility beyond IE has not been mentioned.
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
