User Driven E-commerce RSS Feeds

I've been browsing the MSN Sandbox the other day and the MSN Shopping Beta announcement immediately captured my attention with a simple sentence: "User driven RSS feeds, a first for shopping portals."

User driven RSS feeds?

Sounds like something that certainly needs to be taken a look at.

MSN Shopping certainly goes quite far with RSS, giving you access to dynamically customizable RSS feeds directly below each product list.

For example, you're browsing one of the books categories and directly below each specific category you'll find an RSS feed that exactly matches the product list on the screen.

"MSN Shopping will send you up-to-date news whenever a new product is added in the categories you selected. It's simple, it's fast, and it's free!"

Furthermore, by using certain selection criteria to display products on the site, such as Most popular, Highest user rating, Lowest price and so on, the provided RSS feed at the bottom of the screen changes as well, giving you permanent access to the content determined by your criteria.

User friendly? Certainly. A much better way than pushing your customers through several settings screens to set-up their customized RSS feeds.

This way the customer rather "creates his selection" by using the site, seeing his results on the screen and then having the option to directly subscribing to "those" results via RSS. This also works for their search results.

However, MSN could do better promoting the RSS feeds at the bottom, by saying something more compelling and acurate than simply "Add MSN Shopping content to other sites". Yeah, you certainly convinced me with this one ...