• by Shankar Gupta , August 2, 2005

MSN Monday unveiled an overhaul of its shopping site, Shopping.MSN.com, with new features that include a comparison shopping engine and RSS feeds to update customers on new product launches in the categories that they shop for most.

The comparison shopping feature allows users to examine products and prices in multiple stores. The new release also includes user ratings and reviews; at launch, the site had 70,000 product reviews and 170,000 merchant ratings.

MSN is also offering to deliver consumers news about products and deals via RSS feeds. The RSS categories include general product types like clothing, electronics, music, and computing, as well as more niche areas, like digital cameras and evening dresses.

Other features include a "recently viewed" products list, and lists of favorite categories, searches, and the ability to save pages of search results. The search function has also been refined--allowing users to search by price, brand, and seller, as well as category-specific search fields--resolution and zoom for digital cameras, for example.