Attention ShoppeRSS
Today is “Microsoft Grants Your Wish Day. ” Too bad for you they picked me. Too bad for me I didn’t get to pick the wish. Anyway…
Back in March I put up an “RSS/Atom Feed Wish List” that had a variety of things I was wishing I could get as syndicated feeds. Among them was this easy win:
Retail pricing
I’m not Mr. Big Shopper, but there are items here an there that I’d like to keep an eye on to find out when they go on sale. Sort of like EBay’s “watch item”, but without the old-school email.
For example, it would be slick if Price Grabber provided a feed that tells you when a new merchant is selling the iPod shuffle cheaper than everyone else…
So this particular wish wasn’t that high on my list, but I guess I should thank Microsoft anyway for granting something like it. MSN Shopping has recently rolled out a number of new features, and one of the cooler ones is an RSS feed for any search results you pull up.
Simply type in your search criteria, “nose hair trimmers” for example, and at the bottom of the search results you’ll find an RSS icon that links to a corresponding RSS feed. Add that feed to your reader, and you’ve got an automatically-updated shopping list of all the great ways to trim that unsightly nostril straw.
More to the technical point, MSN Shopping has opened up its shopping search engine via a very easy REST request interface. Simply add the product name to this URL and you’ll get back an RSS feed of the results:
http://shopping.msn.com/xml/xmlresults/shp/?format=rss&text=YOUR+PRODUCT+SEARCH
Right now it looks like only RSS 2.0 is supported as an output format, but the URL parameters make it clear somebody has at least thought about other formats. In the meantime, you can even simplify the URL to this:
http://shopping.msn.com/xml/xmlresults/shp/?text=YOUR+PRODUCT+SEARCH
Happy shopping. And don’t forget the trimmers.
