A few weeks ago we had a ton of readers asking what had happened to eBay RSS feeds. The ability to follow a sellers listings by subscribing via RSS to their eBay shop had vanished from the site.
eBay have now told us “There were some issues in the last couple of weeks which are all resolved now. Any feed already subscribed to will work as expected”. What they didn’t add is that there are few places on the site where you’ll see RSS buttons to instantly subscribe to new feeds.
If you check any old style eBay shop you’ll find that the RSS button has reappeared but you won’t find the RSS button on the new eBay shop design.
There used to be RSS buttons all over eBay, but they disappeared with the latest site design. For instance if you used to use eBay “Saved Searches”, you could save them on eBay or choose to follow them on RSS. Saved searches have now been changed to “Followed Searches” and form part of the eBay Feed on your default eBay home page. RSS buttons have vanished
How to save eBay RSS feeds
For searches
You can still follow eBay RSS feeds if you wish, it’s just a little more work. For instance if you want to create a search RSS feed for a “View sellers other items” search or a keyword/category search, just perform your search on eBay and then add &_rss=1 to the end of the URL in your browser navigation bar. This will give you the RSS feed which you can add to your favourite RSS reader.
For shops
For eBay shops it’s a little more complicated as there’s a mix of URLs depending on how you nagivated to the shop on eBay. Best advice is simply to add &_rss=1 to a “View sellers other items links” (which is practically the same as a Shop RSS feed). However if you do want the shop feed you’ll need to construct the URL in the format https://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/ebay shop name/_i.html?rt=nc&_rss=1&_rssstore=1
One Response
Just a quick tip about constructing those RSS URLs…
During the recent eBay RSS failure, we noticed that often we could resuscitate the RSS link by also adding “/rss” after the “/sch” earlier in the URL, in addition to the usual &_rss=1 suffix. I think this was always part of the correct link syntax from eBay’s original core site RSS feeds. It even worked with most other eBay international sites, last we checked.
This may come in handy in the future if eBay again makes adjustments to the feeds.