My eBay RSS Feeds

What is a RSS feed?

Really Simple Syndication aka RSS feeds are commonly used today as a way to get a quick summary of a site. The easiest example is a news sites. News sites use RSS feeds to provide a summary, and link to their articles. People that subscribe to the news site's RSS feed see the article in their news reader of choice, and can decide if it's worth their time from the description. When you subscribe to many different RSS feeds, it allows you to save time by giving you a one stop shop for every site you want updates on.

If you want a more indepth definition of RSS feeds it can be found here at Wikipedia

Item RSS feed

The RSS feed provides you with a list of your auctions. This feed is useful if you just want a list of your auctions added to blogs, firefox live bookmarks and any other web application that allows RSS feeds to be displayed. This feed does not give the current price, only the ending time, BIN price, and starting price.

This feed was designed for applications where you just want to display items that have not ended yet.

Here is a sample of how the RSS feed would look in the Pluck news reader:

Status RSS feed

The Status RSS feed differs from the normal RSS feed becuase it provides you with realtime information about the auction. This includes the current price, number of bids, shipping price, BIN price is avaliable, and end time. When used in a RSS news reader, it basically gives you a summary of all the auctions that have changed since the last time you looked at the RSS feed.

This is extemely useful when you have a lot of auctions, and just want to know what changed since the last time you checked.

Here is a sample of how the status RSS feed would look in the safari news reader:

If you are using Safari just click on an RSS feed link to see this. Safari comes with a built in RSS feed reader.

How do I use the RSS feed?

There are many ways to use the RSS feed. One is to attach it to your personalized portal pages. Here are 3 examples, click on the links to view detailed instructions on how to add the feed. Screenshots included!