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e-commerce and rss

Posted by joy

Why don’t more e-commerce sites use RSS? A few have beta feeds, but it doesn’t seem widespread.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 12th, 2005 at 8:23 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “e-commerce and rss”

  1. Mitch Says:
    October 12th, 2005 at 10:13 pm

    Yahoo recently published a report that touched on user-awareness of RSS feeds and related technologies. A depressing 12% of sampled users knew about RSS, and only an even more depressing 4% had knowingly used RSS.

    My guess is that they don’t see the point of investing in such a system if so few people are going to utilize it.

    Report can be found here:
    http://publisher.yahoo.com/rss/RSS_whitePaper1004.pdf

  2. fluffy Says:
    October 13th, 2005 at 12:09 am

    Fortunately, Firefox and Safari both support it in ways that people who are interested in subscribing to a page know it’s subscribable. Unfortunately, business people don’t see the value in this, and so it’s probably pretty hard for engineers who do see the value to convince higher-ups that it’s worth spending the couple of hours for making an RSS view for, say, recommended product feeds or whatever.

  3. me Says:
    October 13th, 2005 at 2:55 pm

    i don’t buy it.

  4. colson Says:
    October 21st, 2005 at 12:15 am

    But maybe more importantly they are looking at it the exact same way that the above posters are. Look beyond just reaching the consumer. Look at reaching a large breed of search engines such as Shopping.com or Froogle with a unified and standardized platform. I think there is plenty of untapped potential in RSS beyond just reaching the consumers via direct methods. I just don’t think anyone has come up with the easiest method to extract the value from syndication.