eBay PartnerNetwork Blog

It’s Time to Upgrade Your Feed to RSS v2

October 17th, 2011 | Scott Parent

On April 18th we launched RSS v2 on a more advanced platform leveraging our Finding API. You may recall we blogged about these changes and the importance of migrating to the new version on April 1st. As announced, the infrastructure behind RSS v1 stopped being supported as of June 30, 2011. We thought it might be a good time to remind and encourage all publishers still using RSS v1 to migrate to RSS v2.

For those of you who had previously had issues migrating to RSS v2 due to inconsistencies between the data fields provided, these issues have been resolved.  All fields available in RSS v1 are present in RSS v2, though they will require mapping. You can also expect increased stability and scalability in RSS v2. There are several optional parameters and filters you will be able to take advatange of in RSS v2, including an old favorite allowing you to limit the items returned by a specific country. Download all mappings and optional parameters and filters HERE.

You can still access the RSS feed from within the ePN Portal under Tools > Widgets in your account interface. We will soon be updating our Help content to include documentation on all parameters and filters within RSS v2 so stay tuned!

If you have questions please feel free to leave a comment below. We look forward to getting everyone upgraded to RSS v2!

  • utrecht1976

    But what about the core feeds? The feeds when you get when you click the RSS button on a result page on eBay?

  • Wayne

    Is it my browser, or does that PDF need some love to be usable?

  • Wayne

    Also, due to the initial release being so bug-riddled, do you think the corrections you’ve made in this will yet again break things for us due to our own corrective measures with the first release?

  • http://ebaypartnernetworkblog.com Scott Parent

    We tried to upload the mappings in .xls format, but WordPress wouldn’t allow that. The PDF was not optimal, so we have updated the link to reference a Google Doc. This should be better.

  • Mark – The Word Bay Guy

    Finally! A full sheet of specs has been a long time coming. Good to see some additional parameters make a return too – like “Available to” and “Minimum bids”. The pagination options will make things a whole lot easier too. Hope there aren’t going to be too many changes going forward so we can work on stable versions of our applications.

  • Wade at phpBay.com

    Scott, thanks for the update documentation.

    With entriesPerPage and pageNumber, is there any data in the feed that would or could return, the number of items or pages available based on the query, if those two parameters are used? I may be missing it, but in case they are not there, they would be very useful to build a paging system. Without them, there is no way to determine how many results are available to effectively build a pagination system.

    Thank you for your consideration.

    Wade

  • Michelle

    Yes, @Scott, what Wade said, please reply ASAP thousands of us affiliates are waiting for you eBay. Googles already wiped half of our sites out because of your bad, extremely slow feeds. We need this fix ASAP!

  • http://ebaypartnernetworkblog.com Scott Parent

    Stay tuned – I am working with our product team to get some answers around this.

  • http://ebaypartnernetworkblog.com Scott Parent

    Wade,

    I spoke to our Product team and they said that your request is an enhancement, we can put it in the pipeline but could not commit to a timeline for delivery right now. We will look at returning the number of items in the query response as an additional parameter. This will help publishers to paginate the result set.

  • Mark – The Word Bay Guy

    Yes, I echo Wade’s request, I was wondering about that too. Of course we CAN programmatically enumerate the full result set, but that could cause additional overheads. Wade, are you sure that that data is not already in there somewhere? I haven’t had a poke around for a while…

  • Dan Champion

    Two further requests:

    1. Can postage be included in the results? Otherwise the only way of accurately displaying BIN prices to users is to limit the feed requests to return items with free shipping.

    2. Any chance of a keyword exclusion parameter? This would save a lot of headaches.

    Thanks.

  • Eric Moore

    @Dan Champion: keyword exclusion can be accomplished by using the minus (-) sign. So if I wanted to search “thermos” and “bottle”, but not “mug” and not “tumbler” the parameter would be keyword=thermos+bottle+-%28mug%2Ctumbler%29

    This is equivalent to typing thermos bottle -(mug,tumbler) into the search box on eBay.

  • Eric Moore

    @Scott – we use Widgetbox to display RSS feeds on our website. Curiously, the new “rest” urls cause IE8 to break. Old RSS URLs work just fine. Since you guys have teamed up with Widgetbox in deploying your tools, I wonder if you realized this?

  • http://ebaypartnernetworkblog.com Scott Parent

    Hi Eric – Have you reached out to Widgetbox about this? They maintain their code so i would think that would be the right place to start?

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