eBay RSS Feed – How To Manually Refresh Your eBay Listings

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As of eBay’s 2018 Seller’s Update, eBay sellers can no longer refresh their own RSS Feed.

While RSS Feeds still exist on eBay, the toggle for sellers to refresh them is no longer available.

According to the Seller Update, RSS Feeds are either outdated or will automatically be taken care of for sellers.  So what to do?  Our vote is to not worry about it!  There are other things you can do that will have the same effect as refreshing your feed!

Why Did Refreshing Your RSS Feed Work?

Refreshing your RSS feed worked because it gave refreshed your last 50 listings, giving the appearance to eBay (and buyers) that you had new listings.

eBay’s algorithm rewards sellers who list daily and have a constant influx of new items for sale. In other words, they reward sellers that make them the most money.

If you choose to “list and forget” your items you’ll see your sales slowly dwindle as eBay ranks your items lower and lower in search.

What Is An RSS Feed?

Simply put, an RSS Feed is a program that makes sure readers/users get the freshest data possible.

An RSS Feed can both notify readers of new content or, in the case of eBay sales, affect search results so that the newest listings are shown first to potential buyers.

In other words, the older your listings get, the further down in search results they appear.  If they are listed long enough, it’s possible that your potential customers never even see your item!  So how could it possibly sell?

However, with eBay’s switch to only allowing GTC (Good ’till Canceled) listings, it means that refreshing your items is more important than ever if you don’t want to be left with stale inventory.

How To Refresh Your eBay Listings

We have always preached that the best way to improve eBay sales is to list list list!  Listing daily on eBay is the thing that will transform your business faster than any tips or tricks.

We recommend sellers try to list at least 5 new items per day and, if you know you’ll fall short beforehand, schedule listings to go live so you’ll have a constant influx of new products in your store.  We routinely schedule listings to go live in the middle of the night and wake up to additional sales.

Since the eBay RSS Reset is gone, check out some of these other ways to increase your eBay sales.

However, in short, they are no shortcuts.

The 3 best ways to refresh your eBay listings (sans RSS Feed) are as follows:

  • List More. Listing new items will give every item in your store a lift as eBay seems to reward both new items and active stores with better search placements.
  • End & Relist Items. Many sellers find that ending their listings and then relisting them (using the “sell similar” function” results in some quick sales as their items are again pushed to the top of results. We also run auctions once or twice a year and put everything in our store (older than 6 months) on mega-sale.
  • Markdowns or Promoted Listings. If you’re so tired of eBay fees that you’ve never given promoted listings a try, you’re missing out. Go right now and promote all of your fixed-price listings at 1%. When we first tried it we doubled our sales for around a week as we cleared out old stale items.

I won’t even say that I miss the RSS Feed on eBay as it was no more effective than the above options. The only time it actually had an advantage is when you were not able to list anything new and needed a crutch to appear active. So it’s no wonder that eBay did away with it.

So, instead of looking active, actually, just be active and your eBay sales will follow suit.

How To Reset Your eBay RSS Feed (No Longer Works)

The most complete way for a listing that looks fresh to eBay’s search engine program (known as Cassini) is to end your long-time listings and re-list.  However, this is impractical for any seller that has more than a few dozen items in their store (yes you had to have a store to refresh your RSS feed).  So how to do it…

  1. Find the RSS Feed refresh page on the eBay website (Click Here for quick access)
  2. Toggle on “Don’t activate your Fixed Price listings via RSS” and click Apply
  3. Wait.  Waiting overnight is best, but people recommend waiting for at least 6 hours before…
  4. Revisit the RSS Feed page and reactivate your RSS Feed.
  5. Sit back and reap the rewards of increased sales!

Now it’s worth noting that this method was never foolproof.  Its effects were temporary and it only refreshed the first 100 listings in your store.  For this reason, we recommended refreshing your RSS Feed every couple of weeks!

Without that option, just be one top of your listings and everything will be fine.

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