I'm so sad to see this feature go - I used it every day, and bought most of my eBay items via it.<p>If anyone feels the same, I encourage you to leave a comment on the ebay forum post.<p>In all the talk about RSS being dead/back on HN, it's the loss of features like this that matter to me.<p>For those that don't know, this feature was on life support for years. you had to learn to add the parameter "_rss=1" to make a feed. and then they'd break periodically. But even given all that it was great: you could make a feed from any search.<p>This will effectively remove all my "browsing" in eBay, I'll only go there when I want to find a lower price on a specific thing to buy.<p>P.S.
a comment this reddit thread seems to confirm that this was a deliberate retirement.
<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Flipping/comments/ty009f/ebay_rss_feeds_completely_gone/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/Flipping/comments/ty009f/ebay_rss_f...</a>
At first I thought it might have been a bug, but now that I tested other parameters I see that "_rss=1" isn't just ignored but rather the http response is a redirect to an rss-less path. This doesn't occur with other arbitrary query strings.<p>This has been the primary way I made my shopping on ebay for over 10 years.
None of the existing tools ebay offers compare to a local Newsboat client that alerts you when:<p>1. A rare item you've been looking for has been listed.<p>2. A Buy-It-Now price thershold has been met.<p>3. An auction is ending in say 6 hours and its price is in the accepted range.<p>I can think of no convincing reasons why ebay might want to kill this feature intentionally:
Rate limiting has already been in place in case that's what bothered them. In fact, the search rss rate limiting was less restrictive than their official (more advance) find-API. Is this an attempt to get rid of users who should have used the find-API? Maybe, probably not though.<p>If there isn't already an open source translation service that takes an ebay search URL as its input and returns an RSS feed as its result, I will try to write one.
Not completely...yet.<p><a href="https://www.ebay.com/dsc/i.html?_nkw=walkman&_rss=1" rel="nofollow">https://www.ebay.com/dsc/i.html?_nkw=walkman&_rss=1</a>