RSS is no longer available!!!

[tihomak]

https://www.ebay.com/dsc/i.html?_ipg=200&_nkw=tablet&_rss=1&rt=nc

This no longer works.

[pnicz45]

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.

[jacobert]

I used to have several odd RSS feeds and once or twice a week these oddities would come and I would buy them. going into ebay and searching through this each day to find it its not going to work. And no, setting a saved search will not work as these items are not named in a standard way.

I still dont understand why they removed this other than the new kids doing the coding dont use it.

[pnicz45]

For those using Wordpress and looking for alternative solution - Fast eBay Listings plugin works well, even though you will only be able to display certain types of searches. For example, you can't use some of the advanced search options or show recently sold items. But still better than nothing. There's a monthly fee for this by the way.

[olnavi]

RSS feeds are my primary method of viewing listings and I'm a frequent buyer when I find the things I want. Bring them back, please!

[watrwest]

I'll start off by saying that I have no idea what an RSS feed is.

However, I see in your URL you are still using ...ebay.com/dsc/i.html.

In the last few days Ebay has killed the "dsc" and switched to "src" instead.

When I clicked on your dsc URL the resulting results page of 62,000+ items came up as...
https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_ipg=200&_nkw=tablet&rt=nc

Usually eBay automatically switches from dsc to sch.

But sometimes not and you get the little kid & "we've looked everywhere."

If that is what you get, try going into your bookmarks and changing all the dsc's to sch.

[watrwest]

For my purposes, the advantage of dsc was that the resulting page was very "clean"...

...the sch page has much more lint...

... but dsc  is gone and I doubt very much that ebay will resurrect it.

[tihomak]

No, eBay did not kill dsc since the URL clearly works:

https://www.ebay.com/dsc/i.html?_ipg=200&_nkw=tablet&_rss=1&rt=nc

What does not work is the RSS feed. The URL above used to generate a feed, and now it shows HTML instead.

This is what an RSS feed looks like in a browser:

[stevangelion]

Doesnt work for anything else other thant that ONE search for some reason. I don't understand why eBay is so intent of getting rid of RSS. I'm not the only one who uses it religiously. I'm going to be spending less time on  eBay and spending less money on eBay now because of this.

Why can't we have RSS? Please someone from eBay explain this.

[pnicz45]

"As of Q3 2022, there are 135 million eBay users worldwide (eBay, 2022). This refers to the number of shoppers who have bought something on eBay at least once in the past 12 months. The number of eBay users in Q3 2022 marks a 2.2 percent fall from the previous quarter and a 11.2 percent decrease from the year before."

eBay is losing more and more users at the moment so why make it more difficult for them to find what they are looking for?

[brian_burke@ebay]

@tihomak As you are likely aware, we stopped supporting RSS last year. Many factors go into deprecating functionality, including amount of usage and cost to continue supporting it. 

Some other platforms discontinued supporting RSS about a decade ago.

@All who posted in this thread. If there is functionality that is not in Saved Search that you would like to see, please let me know. No promises that it can or will be built, but I'm willing to bring ideas back to the team. Please don't state reinstate RSS, it will be a waste of all of our time.

Thank you. 

Brian

[fubarbazquux]

Hello Brian,

The functionality that I got from RSS feeds that Saved Search doesn't currently provide revolve around timely, concise, easily digested data. An RSS of a search will update on whatever schedule I put the RSS reader (I use Thunderbolt) on, it provides me real-time information about what new things have been posted, it won't clutter my view with things I've already seen, I can access a lightweight application to see everything, and I can scan and sort and curate a long list of posts quickly to see if there are any I want to click into and investigate.

As far as I'm aware, Saved Search will give me a daily email summary about the searches I've saved, I need to open the site and look through postings as if I had just made the search manually, and if I want to get updates throughout the day on any of those searches I need to load up the eBay site and navigate to those searches and see for myself if anything new has gone up.

If I'm incorrect on any of that I'd be happy to be corrected, I haven't used Saved Searches for years due to RSS' efficiency and ease of use so my memory of it may be dated. RSS is what has allowed me to look through thousands of postings a day - and throughout the day - in mere minutes to find the things that exactly fit my desires before losing out to someone who managed to see the post sooner. I realize that a sale is a sale in the view of eBay, but leaning on the functionality that RSS affords me has been invaluable to me as an eBay customer and so functionality in Saved Search that mimics or enhances those aforementioned features of RSS would go a long way for me continuing to have a pleasant user experience with eBay that isn't time consuming and leads to successful purchases of things I highly value that may only briefly hit the market once every few years.

Thank you for your time,

Ryan

[nngys9anbnyv]

> If there is functionality that is not in Saved Search that you would like to see

RSS feeds.

Please reinstate them.  They're the only reason I buy from ebay instead of amazon.

[tihomak]

RSS is simply irreplaceable. Nothing can substitute it. Just to give you an idea of the functionality loss to people who use RSS, it's like replacing the eBay website with a mail order catalog.

eBay is useless without RSS. You can probably get around by querying eBay's REST API directly to generate a feed or using a third-party tool, but it's not easily available to most people.

RSS will stay with us forever, just like SMTP or HTTP.

[olnavi]

@fubarbazquuxstated perfectly why "saved searches" aren't nearly as useful as RSS feeds. Many of us here had a multitude of ebay feeds (I personally had well over 100) that we peruse throughout the day and now they're all empty. I don't know about the others but I absolutely do not have time to do +100 searches manually on ebay.

Trying to give you guys our money should not be this difficult.