Sourcing For Gadget Shops, How To Use RSS Feeds To Keep Stock Lists Up To Date

Attention gadget shop owners and eBay electronic gadgets sellers! Do you have trouble keeping up to date with the latest gadgets and e-commerce developments and making your site 'sticky' enough to develop a loyal customer base?

A good option to consider may be the use of a RSS feed. A web 2.0 format that keeps netizens up to date with recent developments on the internet and helps webmasters everywhere develop an online community that is more loyal than has ever been possible.

It didn't seem so long ago that keeping up to date with the latest cool new electronic gadgets and spy gadgets was no problem at all. There were only a handful of gadget sites out there and, with even fewer blogs to monitor; keeping up to date with new electronic gadgets was easy.

Keeping customers loyal was also not a problem as there was a good chance there were only a handful of similar sites on the internet offering similar products making it very easy to differentiate yourself from your competitors. There were probably even only a handful of gadget shops selling is gadgets for men.

Unfortunately those days have changed.

As of May 2008 there were 3000 gadget blogs alone registered on popular blog aggregate Technorati with the website announcing it had indexed 100 million blogs in December 2007.

So what does that mean for you the gadget shop owner or eBay gadget reseller? What it means is that there's more to sort through to get product ideas and more competitors for your customers' attentions and disposable incomes.

This is where RSS will be invaluable for your business.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a format which webmasters and content creators use to create bulletin-like 'feeds' which are sent out to subscribers when the webmaster's site is updated or a new story is added.

This means you don't need to go to the website to find out if they've added a new product or news story... instead the website essentially comes to you and tells you what has been added. It is also a useful way of keeping your customers informed about all the latest news on your site and getting customers to come back.

Setting up a RSS feed for your site and getting RSS feeds from a gadget shop or blog on the future gadgets, unusual gadgets or cool spy gadgets to buy couldn't be easier with popular blog aggregator, Icerocket.com, offering a free RSS creation service.

Once you have set up the service it is important to remember that RSS feeds are short by nature and only contain text, or hyperlink text. So it is important to include an enticing title and make sure your first two or three sentences are something that will make people want to visit the page.

Receiving RSS feeds is also a relatively easy task to accomplish with a wide number of RSS feed readers being available. In fact all that needs to be done is to set up a RSS reader and subscribe to the RSS feeds you are interested in.

Some of the more free web-based readers are Google Reader, My Yahoo, Bloglines and Newsgator. They all are extremely easy to sign up to and mostly look and operate much like email accounts like Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail.

The next step is to subscribe to feeds from gadget shops and blogs on gadget gifts that are guaranteed to keep you ahead of your competitors with stock.

This can be done any number of ways depending on which feed reader and which internet browser you are using. You can search on the readers themselves for relevant feeds. However this is likely to leave you with a large number of computer gadgets, USB gadgets and high tech spy gadgets blogs to keep checking up on.

If the home gadgets website has a RSS subscription button on its news page designed for your chosen reader then you won't have any problem subscribing. All you need to do is to click on the button and follow the steps. You could also click on the RSS button and copy the URL from the page of code that opens (the URL will probably contain the code XML or feed). You should then paste it into the 'add feed' dialog box in your RSS reader.

Flock or Firefox browsers make adding RSS feeds extremely easy. All you need to do is to click on the RSS link at the top of the page beside the URL bar and another window will open, letting you set up a feed directly in your browser.

Transform your gadget shop into a dominant online force by getting a RSS reader and RSS subscriptions to keep up to date with all the news on latest gadgets and new inventions and a RSS feed of your own to make your site stickier and your customers more loyal to you.

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