Though eBay has maintained RSS feeds for its Stores, official announcements, and discussion boards, users really wanted to see them create RSS feeds for search terms.
Consider it wish granted. AuctionBytes editor Ina Steiner reported on the debut of RSS feeds for search terms.
EBay’s Arturo Zacarias, Senior Product Manager, New Technologies, discussed the new feature in a brief announcement to eBay’s user community:
This week we’re adding RSS support to our eBay Search pages. With this enhancement you can create a custom RSS feed that will deliver the results of your eBay Search to you via any RSS reader. Since we are integrating the RSS support with our Advanced Search pages, you’ll have complete control over how you narrow down your search.
We’re working to add RSS to other areas as well in the coming months, so stay tuned.
Users will need to add those search term RSS 2.0 feeds manually to their feed reader of choice. Neither Firefox’s Live Bookmarks nor Opera’s RSS detection picked up the feed created with a search query from a test search we did for “V For Vendetta.”
Also, eBay acknowledge some issue going forward with the search term feeds:
Since many readers cache information and poll at most every 30 minutes, listings that appear on the RSS feed will not have an end time less than 15 minutes from the moment the feed was retrieved. Therefore, if your reader requests the feed now, the first item will end in at least 15 minutes.
Initially this feature will not support all search parameters available through Advanced Search pages. In the next few days we will include on this page a full list of unsupported filters.
An entry in the feed for an item will show current price, number of bids if any, links to Bid now, Add to watch list, and Buy It Now if available, the auction’s end date, and a link to the item’s page on eBay.
If you have found RSS feeds useful for your business, or want to ask questions of others who have implemented them now, stop by and comment at SyndicationPro.
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David Utter is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business.
