MSN is in the process of revamping the MSN shopping portal, hoping to better compete with Google's Froogle, eBay and Amazon.com, as well as comparison-shopping sites such as BizRate and Yahoo's Shopping.

Jim Barr, General Manager of MSN Shopping & Marketplaces said Microsoft's goal is to make its shopping site more convenient and complete.

"Our ability to expose our shopping experience across the entire MSN Network is a strong advantage for our merchants and our consumers," Barr told Microsoft Watch.

The exact launch date of the new shopping portal is not yet public. But the new site will likely launch this summer, according to officials with the Redmond software vendor.

MSN began quietly beta testing the new shopping portal in February, announcing the beta at the bottom of a blog post about the revamped MSN.com site. Around the same time, MSN pulled the shopping link from the MSN Search site.

The initial response to MSN Shopping Beta was largely positive, with testers complimenting in Web posts the cleaner layout, dropdown menus, breadcrumb trails, price range searching, and more comprehensive round-up of products. But there was some criticism of the functionality of the new comparison shopping tools. Some testers also found that search pages loaded slowly and with incorrect results from limited sellers.

MSN needs to update its shopping site to remain competitive, industry watchers said.

"In terms of their existing (MSN shopping portal) product, it's pretty much understood that it's just not competing. I've even heard someone say that it's essentially just advertising, rather than a full-fledged shopping site," said Greg Linden Founder and CEO of Findory.com, a personalized news service based on web crawling technology.

"One thing that Google's Froogle, Yahoo's Shopping, Amazon and eBay have that MSN Shopping currently does not is reviews of their products. People want to know that they can get authoritative, objective reviews of products from a site before they buy them." Linden said. "Another really big piece that MSN Shopping, and others such as eBay, is missing is called 'authority' - the ability to recognize if two merchants are selling the same product, and aggregate the reviews. This is something that Froogle and a few smaller sites already do."

While Linden said he wasn't sure how the revamped MSN Shopping will work, he said he expects MSN to use the same approach as eBay and Amazon do.

"To get their product listed on eBay and Amazon, merchants need to explicitly upload their product information. In contrast, meta-shopping search engines, like Google's Froogle, crawl everything on the Web, seek out product information and aggregate it for all to see," he said.

MSN shopping announced an alliance PriceGrabber.com on June 13, just days after starting a new MSN Shopping Insider blog to communicate with consumers about the many upcoming changes and new features on MSN Shopping.

The partnership with PriceGrabber.com is intended to enhance the MSN product selection, add comparison shopping functions, and make available to users PriceGrabber's database of product ratings and reviews. The alliance will make millions of additional products available to MSN shoppers.

"The deal with PriceGrabber was primarily driven by MSN Shopping, in an interest in bringing more offers and a more complete experience to shoppers," said Kamran Pourzanjani, President and CEO of PriceGrabber, in an interview with Microsoft Watch.

The new PriceGrabber listings will go live on the MSN Shopping site before the fourth quarter, according to published reports.

PriceGrabber has other partnerships in place with other large portal vendors, such as AskJeeves and About.com.

"The shopping engines with portal partners seem focused primarily on maximizing the value of these relationships. The deal with PriceGrabber helps MSN Shopping in this area, as they will be able to satisfy a greater percentage of their visitors," said Sean O'Rourke, publisher of the Organized Shopping Blog.

But "MSN Shopping's biggest challenge, if they want success outside their network, will be to think like an independent site," O'Rourke continued. "In-network shopping engines seem more content to satisfy their customers, but independent shopping engines know they must delight their customers."

Luckily, for Microsoft, O'Rourke said, "MSN gets to stand on the shoulders of all the comparison shopping engines that came before them." Going forward, they can choose to adopt today's best practices, or they can try to define tomorrow's best practices."