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How to Set Up Your RSS Feeds

eBay provides eBay Store owners with this powerful tool, so why not make the most of it?  It's free and how you promote it is free also.  eBay can create an RSS feed of your most recently listed items (as items are relisted, this is technically a new listing).  The simple trick is to list something in your store every few days.  Try to list no less than 20 items every few days as this is the number that eBay makes available at one time. RSS FEEDS 101 Please note that this is still pretty new to me, and I hope to try and explain this in a simple and hopefully correct way to the many questions I have seen. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and is a format designed for syndicating information.  Pretty much anything that can be broken down into discrete items can be syndicated via RSS. RSS technology has been really taking off.  According to a 2005 study, 5% of internet users said they used RSS.  That's almost 46,700,000 users!  Most news sites publish RSS feeds and aside from news, these feeds can also be used for announcing new products, web site updates, blogs and anything else to keep your visitors informed.  Yes, this includes our listings on eBay.  RSS feeds allow users to view a large amount of information without having to visit several web sites to obtain it. As a Seller, you will be able to provide your new listings on eBay directly to potential buyers.  By setting up your RSS preferences on eBay, you tell eBay to make your listings available in RSS format.  You then have to get that information, those listings, "burned" or set up into feeds.  The most popular site is Feedburner.  Feedburner takes the information provided by eBay, your new listings, and prepares them into RSS format, now called feeds, and establishes a URL location (feed title) for your feed content.  You are now able to offer potential buyers the opportunity to subscribe to your RSS feeds by providing them with this link. As a Buyer, you now have the opportunity to subscribe to an eBay Seller's feeds using the link that is provided to you.  You then need to sign up for an RSS reader, the most popular is Bloglines.  Once you have an RSS reader, you can subscribe to your favourite news sites or in this case, see what your Favorite eBay Sellers are listing.  Let’s say you have five news sites you check on a regular basis and have fifteen Favorite eBay Sellers.  Why take all that time and effort to check each individual web site or eBay Store for updates.  By having a RSS reader and subscribing to those sites you are interested in, you now have one place where you can go to read all those feeds, reviewing a large amount of information in a shorter and quicker amount of time. So Sellers, are you reading to set up your RSS feeds? 1.  ON EBAY Login to your eBay account Go to My eBay > Selling Manager Click on Manage My Store On the left hand navigation bar, look under Marketing Tools Click on Listing Feeds Under RSS feeds, select Distribute your listings via RSS and click Apply Click on your red door Store Icon to go to your Store Scroll down to the bottom of the page and you will see an orange box with the letters RSS in it Click the orange RSS icon and you will be taken to a new page with a bunch of coding on it In the browser address bar, right click on the URL, it starts like http://rss.api.ebay.com/....... After you right click on the URL, select Copy. You may want to copy this to Notepad (or another text editor) so you don't lose it. 2.  ON FEEDBURNER Go to Feedburner.com Create an account (it's free).  The link is at the top right of the page.  Once your account is created, you will see this next screen. Enter the URL of your eBay Store RSS feed (that you copied) in the empty text box under the Burn a feed right this instant (you only have to do this once). Click Next Keep the Feed Address given, or rename it to your own. (I renamed the kYVw portion on mine to awelldressedbulletUS) Click Activate Feed After the feed is burned and named, the following screen comes up Click Next You should now be be at your Dashboard (see print screen below) A few folks have had trouble getting to the Dashboard, and if you are at your My Feeds page instead (see print screen below), simply click on your Feed Title And this should bring you to your Dashboard page (see below) Once at your Dashboard, you need to complete a few settings.  Feedburner keeps everything fairly simple, and the following are pretty easy to follow. 1.  Click on the Optimize tab at the top. From the left navigation bar: Click on Browser Friendly and select Clear Feed from the dropdown box and activate this service Click on Smart Feed and activate this service 2.  Click on the Publicize tab at the top From the left navigation bar: Click Pingshot and select as many default services as possible, and also be sure to choose at least 5 of the additional services.  Activate this service as well. Click Chicklet Chooser.  Keep it simple for your customers.  Simply choose the new standard icon or the Plain text and then copy the HTML that is generated in the text box below.  Again, you may want to paste this to Notepad (or another text editor) as well, to save the HTML for future copying. You can now logout 3.  POSTING YOUR CODE (LINK)! This next step is most important.  What you have done to this point is to set your RSS feed preferences on eBay and set up your eBay listings into RSS feeds at Feedburner.  You now have to make your feeds available to potential buyers. Paste the HTML code you copied from Chicklet Chooser wherever you can (I had to tinker with their code and also preferred to save their icon image to host on my own site).  On your eBay Me page, in your emails (if HTML is accepted), your Board Signature Tags, on your website, in your blog, and anywhere you can "legally" post HTML.  This step is what finally allows people the opportunity to subscribe to your RSS feeds.  This is an example of what it would look like. - Click here to subscribe to my RSS feeds in US Dollars Folks DO subscribe to these.  It's catching on and you really can't afford to pass up on such great free advertising for your eBay Store! Thanks to Maureen who motivated me to get this tutorial done and who's tutorial I used as an example and guideline. If you have any questions or experience any difficulties setting this up, drop by the Stores Discussion Board, there's always someone friendly around to answer questions. And apologies, I don't usually use print screens without our Store name blurred out or actual direct links, however, I felt it was required in this case to show clear and exact examples as many folks find this confusing.

Revised August 25, 2006

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