Has eBay Killed RSS Feed Support For Stores & Searches?
UPDATE 1-20-23
It appears eBay may have finally killed the RSS feed for good this time. Sellers in both the US and UK report RSS feeds are no longer working and the work arounds listed below no longer work either.
This is so ridiculous. Completely phased out RSS without any warning or official statement. Our website uses numerous RSS feeds to display eBay items to thousands of our customers, making eBay more money in the process. This morning I just found out that the whole thing just stopped working completely. Great job eBay.
Have ebay UK disabled the RSS feeds?
My search now gets redirected
http://www.ebay.co.uk/dsc/i.html?..
(after redirects): https://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?..
and now does not support RSS.
UPDATE 6-5-22
The /dsc/ link structure appears to be working again for RSS searches on the US .com site.
UPDATE 6-3-22
It appears the previous workaround by tweaking the URL structure for eBay RSS feeds is no longer working.
This doesn't seem to be working anymore. Nor is jeffcarlyle's workaround. Is RSS truly gone for good with no communication from ebay?
Note: it appears the /dsc/ link structure does still work for rss feeds for other eBay sites (UK, CA, AUS, etc), just not on the US .com site.
For example, from eBayUK:
https://www.ebay.co.uk/dsc/i.html?_ipg=200&_nkw=tablet&_rss=1&rt=nc
An eBay community member noticed that saved searches and advanced searches with the /dsc/ format are also not working currently, so it's not just impacting RSS feeds.
It appears that searches that begin with ebay.com/dsc are no longer working the way that they have in the past. Not sure if this is something eBay has changed on purpose or just an unwanted side effect of another change. In a possibly related development, many old saved searches and Advanced Search page features have stopped working.
Searches that begin with ebay.com/sch are still working, but apparently those are not compatible with RSS feeds.
It may be possible to use a similar /dsc/ search on another non- ebay.com site such as ebay.ca or ebay.com.au in order to keep using the RSS feed, though the prices may be shown in a different currency.
So it's possible this could just be a temporary issue where something eBay changed on the .com site has inadvertently broken all urls that use the /dsc/ structure - if that's the case, hopefully it will be fixed.
I'll update as soon as more information is available.
UPDATE 4-12-22
One savvy seller seems to have found a work around that requires slightly tweaking the URL structure that had previously been used for eBay RSS feeds.
I don't know if it is actually exactly the same search, but I was able to get a working rss for the tablet example in the original post:
https://www.ebay.com/dsc/i.html?_ipg=200&_nkw=tablet&_rss=1&rt=nc
The key here seems to be having the "dsc/i.html" in the query instead of sch
eBay community members are lamenting the apparent loss of RSS feed support for stores and searches.
If you're not familiar - an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed is an online file that contains details about every piece of content a site has published. Introduced in 1999, RSS feeds are almost as old as eBay.
While the Gen Z shoppers eBay says are driving a recommerce revolution may not make much use of them, it appears there are some very loyal users who do.
As a buyer I'm very upset that ebay has apparently killed off RSS feed support.
I contacted ebay technical support, but they didn't know if it was a bug or if the feature was disabled.
Does anyone know if RSS feeds are coming back or gone for good?
I know there is "saved searches" but when you're dealing with over 90 searches (like me) doing that is untenable.
If RSS isn't reimplemented I'll definitely buy less items on ebay.
I just don't have the time, plain and simple.
Please Bring back RSS feed support! I use this every day, and almost everything I've bought on eBay over the years is due to this feature.
For example, http://shop.ebay.com/i.html?_nkw=tablet&_rss=1 no longer shows an RSS feed. This significantly impacts my visibility of items for sale.
The following RSS link format no longer works either:https://www.ebay.com/sch/rss/?_ipg=200&_nkw=tablet&_rss=1&rt=nc
The links just show search results as you would see in a browser.
I just noticed this, too. This is horrible. Severely impacts me. sigh Once again, as we move through time, things here get more controlling and more difficult to do just normal business. Always more work. Always less of the pie.
I rely heavily on this feature to keep track of items in several dozen categories using very specific search terms. I don't have the time to run all those searches manually. RSS is the perfect solution to that problem. Serving search results in XML format instead of HTML to support RSS is trivial. Why would they turn off a feature so useful to power users?
The Balance Small Business highlighted some of the useful features of using RSS feeds on eBay back in 2019 - importantly pointing out how easy it is to use RSS to automate posting your eBay listings on a blog or website.
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Automatically post your listings to a blog
Most blogs now support automatic postings via RSS feed. While the features vary from blog to blog, the general effect is the same: supply your blogging software with an RSS feed URL, and it will use that feed to automatically make new blog posts or content for you containing the items in the feed.This is advantageous because your blog can be indexed in search engines in ways that eBay listings sometimes aren’t, and people often find blogs easier to use than searches.
There has been no official word on RSS feeds from eBay as far as I've seen, however it wouldn't surprise me if these changes buyers are noticing are related to recent updates in eBay Stores and saved searches.
Do you use RSS feeds for eBay as either a buyer or seller? Will RSS feeds going away impact your buying and selling habits? Let us know in the comments below!
