A few years back we added RSS output capability to MightyMerchant. We were pretty jazzed, given all the potential uses for RSS. Surprisingly adoption of RSS went nowhere with our customer base. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) was just difficult enough that people didn’t get it.
With the explosion of this social media, web 2.0-ish Internet world we live in, RSS remains relevant, and then some.
If you are not familiar with the concept of RSS, it is a simple structured way to describe data. Here is an example of what an entry from an RSS feed looks like:
<item>
<title>Metric Drill Bits – .18 MM</title>
<link>http://www.biscotoolsupply.com/home/bis/page_776_17/metric_drill_bits_-_.18_mm.html</link>
</item>
While there is nothing so earth shattering about that snippet of code, it is a simple and widely accepted data format that is used by many web-based services. RSS opens up the possibility that you can pass your data around in a structured way to a multitude of sites, people, and services who can then display your data and share it with others. Sharing is a good thing!
RSS has been prevalent across the Internet for several years. Common uses included product feeds, sitemaps for services like Google and Yahoo, distribution of news items. As a practical use of RSS, if I am interested in purchasing a certain type of product on Craig’s list, I can “subscribe” to an RSS feed that will alert me when such an item is posted. Perhaps your customers would like to receive similar alerts from your website.
With the rise of Social Media, there are some interesting ways to use RSS that relate to Ecommerce:
1. Flow announcements from your website into your Facebook page.
2. Automatically stream new products or sale items to your Twitter account.
3. If you have multiple websites or a website and a blog, you can cross-post articles from one to the other.
If you are working to manage all of your social media assets, RSS presents an efficient and effective way to communicate with your audience across many platforms.
