You have heard about RSS everywhere.  But what is the big deal? How can you benefit from its use?  In this guide I will briefly go over two things:

1. How can you use RSS to stay in touch with your market?
2. How to use RSS to market your store?

1.  How can you use RSS to stay in touch with your market?

RSS stands for Rich Site Summary, which allows you to receive updates from certain websites to a RSS reader.  You know that a web site has RSS when it has the orange RSS icon near the bottom of the website.
 
After clicking on this icon you will add that site into your RSS feed reader.  I use Newsfox within Firefox.  I use this solution because it is free and easy to use with Firefox's tabbed browsing.  The program works much like an email client where you select the feed to the left and the topic comes up on the right.  This is very powerful because instead of going to ten to fifteen different websites to find out information about product sourcing, market trends, etc., you go to one place.  This is a major time saver.

2. How to use RSS to market your store?

 eBay stores now have option to allow your store to produce RSS feeds.  It cost you nothing to allow your site to produce RSS so make sure that it is turned on.  This setting is available under manage my store then feature list then listing feeds.  In every touch point with your customer advise them to subscribe to your feed.  Once they subscribe, anytime you add a item to your store they will get an update in their feed reader. More and more people are starting to use feed readers to save them time, so in time this will become a tremendous marketing tool.