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Product RSS Feeds Integration
How are RSS Feeds Identified?
What are RSS Feeds?
What are Product RSS Feeds?
How do Product RSS Feeds Work?
Why use Product RSS Feeds?
Product RSS Feeds Integration & Captures Ecommerce Solution
Captures recommends product RSS feeds and ping update services to each merchant that signs up for an ecommerce solution package. We are excited to announce that we now make it easy for you to offer RSS feeds for all your products, categories, subcategories and the ability to utilize our ping update services tool that gets your feed listed on popular RSS search engines and RSS directory lists. Read more about product RSS feeds below, or learn more about integrating your store with some of our other ecommerce marketing tools.
Captures software allows merchants to take advantage of cutting edge technologies in many ways including the ability to offer RSS feeds for an entire store product catalog including all products, individual categories and seperate subcategories. In addition, we make it easy for you to get it listed on relevant sites online. Begin using the Captures platform now and get setup to start using product RSS feeds in minutes so users can subscribe to any area of your store quickly and easily unsubscribe (it's up to them).
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The most common way to identify a site that publishes and offers an RSS feed is to look for the universal Feed Icon, which represents content in any format to which you can subscribe via an RSS feed reader. The feed icon was originally created for use with the Bookmarks feature in Mozilla Firefox. It is now used universally in connection with web feed enabled applications, online services, blogs, news sites, and in general any site offering information via syndication formats like RSS or XML.
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In order to better understand the benefit of product RSS feeds offered through Captures it is a good idea to know a little bit about RSS feeds in general and how they are used today. RSS, or Really Simple Syndication is a technical programming format that makes it possible for web feed publishers (typically news sites or weblogs) to distribute online content easily and offer an automated subscription service to users interested in being notified about content changes. RSS is based on XML, a widely used standard for text based information exchange between two or more applications on the Internet. RSS feeds can be viewed as plain text files through an RSS feed reader, but they are primarily designed for computer-to-computer communications. RSS and XML are used today by online users who publish regular updates to web-based content and/or wish to keep track of all their favorite sites or blogs, without having to check each one manually or subscribe to updates via email. Simply, RSS is the most efficient way to stay updated on the content that interests you most and allows you to streamline that process by subscribing to individual web feeds and aggregating the information into one place to be read when you are ready.
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Product RSS feeds are for ecommerce enabled sites that wish to offer RSS based subscriptions for their entire store product catalog including feeds for all products, specific category and subcategory pages and even pages generated by our Tag Cloud creator. Captures product RSS feeds require no additional programming and appear on your store once the feature is activated in your administration area. The RSS feeds feature is fully automated and will stay up to date with regular changes to store content or updates to the product catalog. Once an item in your catalog is modified, that item will appear first in the list of items within your RSS feed files. With RSS, you can waive goodbye to email newsletters and never have to worry about customers being able to keep current on catalog updates.
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Add your products and activate feeds:
Merchants simply add their products and additional relevant content to their store and the Captures ecommerce software will automatically generate and publish an RSS XML file. These files are called feeds, which contain the content or messages to be sent. The file generally has a Web address or URL associated with it, just as a typical Web page would have. Captures merchants can then post these URLs on their store for customers to see.
Shoppers subscribe via RSS readers:
New or returning shoppers who want to subscribe to the feed must add that URL into a program called a feed reader. A feed reader is a program located on the Web or on a computer desktop that can read and interpret RSS feed files. At present, there are over 2,000 different feed readers available, most of which are free to use. RSS is also built into the Firefox browser, the Apple Macintosh OSX operating system, and search engines including Google, Yahoo, Ask and Live.com. As of January 2005, six million U.S. Internet users were using RSS feed readers, according to the ongoing Pew Internet & American Life Project. Most feed readers can be used with any feed and can keep track of a number of feeds simultaneously. The process of subscribing to RSS feeds varies from reader to reader, but generally it is the same and very easy to do.
Keep your product catalog updated:
When customers subscribe to a Product RSS Feed they will see the most recent products added to your store that correspond to that feed file in their reader. To keep the file updated all merchants have to do is monitor, modify and update their catalog as usual. When items in the product catalog are added or modified, those items will appear at the top of the feed file for subscribers to see. When items are removed from the catalog they will no longer be listed in the feed file. Product RSS Feeds have three parts: a product title, a product image and description summary. In addition, subscribers can click on hyperlinks to your individual product pages directly from their reader.
Subscribers get updates delivered in real time:
RSS feed readers will automatically check for updates to feed files that have been added by a subscriber. When the reader finds updates, it makes them available to those subscribers in real time. The method in which the message is delivered will depend on the feed reader, but is generally Web/browser based, desktop based or email based.
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Drive targeted traffic and buyers:
Product RSS Feeds allow merchants to distribute time-sensitive information and helps to put customers directly into the shopping process. In addition, RSS feeds help increase the amount of return visits, make it easy for users to return and buy and keeps the store brand name fresh in their minds.
Stay in contact with customers:
Merchants can use RSS to update their current customer base on inventory, new items and recently modified or deleted items. It also allows merchants to spend more time running their online business and processing orders rather than spending large amounts of time with mailing lists or email newsletters. Customers can also easily subscribe and unsubscribe without having to notify the store owner that they need to be removed from a list (Captures stores still offer an email manager and notification tool incase you aren't quite yet ready for RSS).
Easily distribute relevant content:
Captures ecommerce storefronts make it easy for merchants to notify RSS search engines and directory lists that they publish and offer a feed. Use the ping update services tool in your store administration to ping many popular update services. Getting listed on these specific services will help merchant store owners to get new user subscriptions and allows them to show up when users search for related content.
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