RSS Feeds
RSS (RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) provides a way for users to get updates on the newest products that your store offers. Instead of watching your site constantly, users that subscribe to your feeds can receive an instant notification that your store has a new item. Your store primarily provides RSS Feeds, but it also offers another type of feed called Atom Feeds. Some web-sites and software can also make use of feeds, which will only increase the number of eyes that see items on your store. For instance, forums and other sites that are fans of a particular category of items you sell can set their web-site up to display feeds from your site on their site.
Feeds are offered for new items, featured items, categories, and more. This allows users to watch categories or other product specifiers of interest.
Under "Settings → Product Listing Options", the "Items per Page" setting controls how many items will be listed in the RSS and Atom feeds.
Viewing Feeds
Most web-browsers (except Opera) do not support feeds out of the box. Thus, you may suspect that the feed is broken or useless. To view a feed, one must obtain a feed reader. You may also need to setup your web-browser to open feeds using your feed viewer. Once a feed viewer is installed, the browser should automatically know to open feeds using the feed viewer.
Wikipedia provides a list of software that can be used to view RSS feeds - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_feed_aggregators
In web-browsers that support feeds, the browser will notify the user of the availability of feeds.
Feeds for Facebook Shop (GMCP)
The Facebook Shop and any other site that supports Google's Merchant Center Program (GMCP) can utilize feeds to display items on the Facebook Shop or any other site in question. However, GMCP requires a very specific type of feed. This particular feed can be enabled by going to "Store → Setup GMCP (Facebook Shop)" and selecting "Yes". Be sure to read the important information as this feature does require a monthly fee to generate the feed.
At the time of writing, this feature will create a feed with 2000 of the store's items. At some point, all of the store's items will be included.
The feed will only contain items that have at least one image. GMCP feeds will not support items without images.
This one feed can be used on the below listed stores. There may be other websites that support GMCP feeds, but these are the only ones we can verify. Bing Shop and Yahoo Shop might support this feed, but we have not yet been able to confirm.
- Facebook Shop
- Google Shopping
- Instagram Shopping
- Pinterest Business
Promoting Your Store with Feeds
To get free advertising for your products, go to https://feedshark.brainbliss.com/ and fill out the form. Enter the name of your store and provide a description (i.e. "Obtain hard-to-find and rare non-fiction books").
For "Blog URL", enter the web-address of your store (be sure to use "https://"). For the "Feed URL", copy-and-paste the text you entered in "Blog URL", but then append "/feeds/new-products/rss".
Next, check all of the boxes under "Services that accept RSS feeds".
If you have featured items, you could fill out the form a second time, but this time, use "/feeds/featured/rss".
As an example, if I were filling this out for chrislandsdemo.com, the "Blog URL" would be "https://chrislandsdemo.com" and the "Feed URL" would be "https://chrislandsdemo.com/feeds/new-products/rss".
Fill out that form again every so often. The frequency will depend on how often you get new items or featured items.
For those of you that signed up for GMCP feeds, you can also fill out the form for the feed URL "/gmcp". In the case of chrislandsdemo.com, the value would be "https://chrislandsdemo.com/gmcp".