Amazon Offers Virtual Window Shopping Tool: Hands On

— -- Amazon.com is prepping an alternative way to virtually browse some of its most popular products from bestselling books, music, movies, and videogames. The new Web-based tool is called Windowshop.com and it is in beta. You can check it out yourself. I did, and liked its slick interface and think it has the potential to be a nice addition to Amazon.com.

Here what you can expect from Amazon Windowshop.

Amazon Windowshop does away with the static and standard Amazon HTML-based product pages. Instead Windowshop relies on Adobe Flash technology, creating an interactive multimedia Amazon.com viewer of sorts. The interface consists of a scrollable wall of product thumbnail images. (click above image) Interested in a movie? Just click on the movie title and up pops a closer look at the movie title. From here a movie trailer starts playing along with a link to buy the movie.

The same interactive features apply to most all content featured in Windowshop. Click on a book title and the spoken word version of the book starts to read a chapter. Click on a music CD and an image of the CD pops up playing a track from the artist. This feels like browsing a crude version of iTunes.

The Windowshop wall is divided into columns that are sorted by the bestselling books, music, etc. of each week. You can navigate between columns either using the arrow keys on the keyboard, or by clicking and dragging the screen with your mouse. The arrow keys work very well, with thumbnail images loading quickly and the scrolling speeding up the longer you hold down an arrow key.

I did have some problems when trying to scroll through the columns with my mouse as Windowshop would often not register that I had let go of the left mouse button and would continue to follow my cursor. It's a minor annoyance, and only happens when trying to scroll quickly.

In the bottom right corner of each product thumbnail is a buy button, which takes you directly to the product's page on Amazon.com where you can add it to your cart. Music CDs also offer the option to buy the MP3 album from the Amazon.com music store in addition to buying the physical CD.

One big omission on Amazon's part is a search function. However considering that Windowshop only features products that are bestsellers, I can understand that searching for an individual product might not be needed.

I doubt how much I will actually use Amazon Windowshop due to the fact that I seldom turn to Amazon for the most popular products. I view what Amazon has done with Windowshop as pretty cool experiment. I could see Windowshop put to practical use as a navigational tool for set-top boxes or as a browser-based digital content navigator for Amazon that competes head on with iTunes.