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Sellers thus don't need to do anything to prepare items for inclusion in an eBay RSS feed. Instead, educating prospective customers on the benefits of creating a feed could be beneficial to your auctions. As a result, adding instructions on creating and monitoring RSS feeds within the description portion of your listings could help prime the pump and start your audience to look for your upcoming sales.
Amazon.com offers a vast amount of syndicated content from Amazon areas in RSS format. Certain product categories and subcategories offer RSS feeds of the top 10 bestsellers in each. Also, like eBay, search results from Amazon.com stores now have RSS feeds, so consumers can subscribe to a frequent search query. Again, little is currently required from sellers beyond educating the public about RSS.
As a bonus, with these behemoths leading the trend, sellers can expect an increasing number of shopping environments to support RSS feeds.
Affiliates, Aggregators and RSS
Sellers aren't the only ones that can avail themselves to the new trend toward shopping via RSS> Pluck is one of the many available RSS readers out there -- but it's also a little different from other readers in that it is evangelizing RSS as a shopping tool.
The software, which operates as an add-on toolbar for Internet Explorer -- includes eBay and Amazon.com searches directly in its interface, and the software makers glean revenue every time a purchase is made or a user registered on eBay.
Even e-tailers who don't offer RSS yet can still reach buyers who prefer the technology to e-mail or Web surfing. One way is through Real Simple Shopping. The site, which is still in its early stages, enables shoppers to create RSS feeds from among vendors or products categories.
Real Simple Shopping receives promotional e-mail from merchants and reformats the information as an RSS feed. The customer then gets the results via their RSS reader. I created an account and selected to receive announcements from Eddie Bauer, Tiger Direct, and CompUSA. I dragged the RSS button to Pluck and there were the current advertisements from my selected vendors.
The advantage to the consumer is they have the ability to stop receiving announcements from any merchant by changing their selections in their Real Simple Shopping account. They don't have to subscribe to each merchant's e-mail system, and receive whatever additional e-mail may come along.
The disadvantage to the merchant is they lose any personalization since the announcement is being reformatting and retransmitted -- and they lose any ability to track end users' activities. Luckily, Real Simple Shopping said it has plans to work with merchants to implement tracking mechanisms in future versions.
Looking ahead
RSS is clearly only in its infancy, but has already attracted the attention of early adopter consumers -- as well as the e-commerce elite and some innovative pioneers.
As a result, there are likely to be continual additions to the RSS family of readers and ways to make use of RSS feeds. And adding an RSS feed to your own site, working with an aggregator like Real Simple Shopping, or educating eBay shoppers to adopt RSS searches could pay off in spades in the meantime with very little investment.
Scott Koegler is a contributor to eCommerce-Guide.com.
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