eBay to Generate RSS Feeds for Stores

eBay has announced that its stores will now have RSS feed functionality offered. The announcement is available at http://www2.ebay.com/aw/core/200511.shtml#2005-11-10143920.

From the announcement: "If you're a Store owner who is interested in providing listings via RSS feeds, go to "Manage My Store > Listing Feeds (within Store Marketing)". Click on "Distribute your listings via RSS" and click "Apply". The RSS button should appear on the lower left hand side of your Store."

The feed itself is a monster URL; this trimmed-down version works fine, though:

http://rss.api.ebay.com/ws/rssapi?FeedName=StoreItems&UserId=30627075&output=RSS20&storeId=30627075

replace xxxx with the user ID and store ID, of course.

Some quick searches in Yahoo and Google fail to turn up any feeds with this basic structure. Not been enacted that much yet? Search engines not crawling that deeply? I would tend to guess the former. Of course, just because a store hasn't chosen to publish an RSS feed doesn't mean you can't get one anyway, or at least a placeholder one until the store starts publishing a feed. Go to eBay's Find Stores feature. Do a search for something fairly general; I'll choose jackets. You'll get a bunch of results. Click on a store that looks likely. Look in the URL of the store. You'll see a part of it that looks something like this:

&sid=yyyyyyyy

Where yyyyyyyy is a number string. Paste that number into the bolded URL, replacing the xxxxx placeholder string. (Remember you have to paste it two times.) Put that into an RSS feed reader and it's a valid feed. If the store isn't publishing a feed yet, you'll get the message "This store is not providing an RSS listing feed at this time." I do have a couple of stores I like on eBay -- I'll generate these feeds and put them in my feed reader as a placeholder until they do start generating feeds.

I tried a couple of tricks to stick a query into the URL and turn this into a keyword-searchable RSS feed, but alas, it didn't work. I'll have to use FeedDigest or FeedShake for the moment.

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