Refresh Stale Listings

Overview

Stale listings stop selling. eBay's Cassini search algorithm pushes them lower in results the longer they sit unviewed, so a listing that's been live for 60+ days with zero views is effectively invisible — and won't sell again until something changes.

RocketVault's Refresh feature pushes those listings back up the search results so buyers see them again. It targets listings that have had 0 views in the last 30 days and have been active for at least 14 days, then revises them in place — rotating the title with fresh keywords, backfilling any newly-required item specifics, and optionally adjusting the price — without losing watchers, the lifetime view counter, or sold-feedback associations. The end result: stale inventory starts showing up in search again, watchlist notifications fire, and dormant listings start selling.

Soft refresh vs Hard refresh

There are two refresh modes, with different trade-offs:

• Soft refresh is the default. It revises the listing in place via eBay's Inventory API:

  • Rotates the title with AI-optimized keywords (anchored to your card data so it never invents facts).
  • Backfills any missing eBay item specifics that have become required since you first published.
  • Optionally drops the price by your configured percentage (default 3%) — and notifies anyone watching. See Refresh pricing below for how to tune this.

  The eBay item ID stays the same. Watchers, the lifetime view counter, and sold-feedback links are all preserved. eBay's official 2025 stance is that revising beats end-and-relist for long-term seller performance.

• Hard refresh is an escalation. It ends the listing and creates a brand-new one with a fresh eBay item ID. The new listing lands inside Cassini's 48–72hr "new listing" visibility boost, but you lose:

  • All watchers on the old item.
  • The lifetime view counter (resets to zero).
  • Sold-feedback associations to the old item ID.

  Use this only when a soft refresh from 30+ days ago hasn't moved the needle. The button is hidden by default and only enabled when every selected listing qualifies.

  By default, hard refresh re-publishes at the exact same price. Setting a non-zero Hard refresh price drop in Settings → eBay tells RocketVault to mint the new listing at a discount in the same operation — useful when you want both the visibility boost AND a price reduction without making two separate edits.

Refresh pricing — soft & hard drops

Both refresh modes have a per-marketplace price drop dial under Settings → eBay → Refresh pricing:

• Soft refresh price drop — default 3%. Applied every time you soft-refresh. Set to 0% if you only want the title and specifics rotated without touching the price; bump it up to clear sticky inventory faster.
• Hard refresh price drop — default 0% (preserve the exact same price). Set above 0% when you want the new listing to go live at a discount alongside the fresh item ID.

Both dials are capped at 25% and are clamped to your minimum listing price — RocketVault will never drop a $50 card to $1.99 because you fat-fingered a setting.

Watching a refresh happen — the progress modal

When you click Refresh on eBay, RocketVault opens a progress modal that shows what's happening for each listing in real time, one step at a time:

• Loading listing from eBay — pulling the current title, specifics, and price.
• Planning changes — generating the new title with Gemini, computing item-specifics deltas, calculating the new price.
• Updating listing title — pushing the rotated title.
• Updating item specifics — adding any newly-required fields.
• Adjusting price — applying the configured drop with a before/after value.
• Saving — recording the refresh in your audit history.

Hard refresh shows a slightly different flow (validating → ending → cleanup → creating → saving) because it ends and re-publishes the listing instead of revising in place. Either way, each listing in a bulk run gets its own card in the modal with a stage-by-stage checklist; the new item ID, before/after title, and before/after price are surfaced as soon as the relevant stage completes.

You can dismiss the modal once everything is done, or cancel mid-stream — RocketVault aborts the SSE stream cleanly and the listings that already finished keep their changes.

The Refresh tab

The cleanest way to see your full refresh state is the Refresh tab on the Listings page (alongside Active / Drafts / Ended / Sold). It splits everything into three stacked sections:

A header bar shows your daily quota ("X of Y refreshes left today") so you can size a bulk action before you trigger it. Imported listings (created on eBay before you started using RocketVault) are deliberately excluded — refresh only operates on listings RocketVault published.

Per-listing refresh history

Open any active listing from the Listings page and scroll past the description. The Refresh history panel shows every soft and hard refresh that's ever run on that listing, newest first:

• Date + type chip — soft or hard, with the levers that fired (title, specifics, price).
• Title before / Title after — only rendered when the title actually changed.
• Price before / Price after — only rendered when the price actually changed.
• eBay item ID rotation — hard-refresh entries show the predecessor → new item id.

Listings that have been refreshed recently also display an Eligibility banner at the top of the modal — "Eligible for soft refresh: 60 days listed, 0 views in 30d" — plus an inline Refresh now button that fires the soft refresh without leaving the modal.

"Stale (zero views)" filter on the Active tab

The fastest way to surface refresh candidates is the Stale (zero views) chip on the Active tab of the Listings page. It only renders the listings the staleness service has flagged — so you're never sifting through healthy, viewed listings.

Daily caps

Refresh has a per-tier daily cap to keep eBay's anti-abuse layer happy and to keep marginal cost in line with your plan. Soft and hard refreshes share the same cap — both count.

The counter resets at 00:00 UTC. If you select more listings than slots remaining, the API only runs the first N — the over-quota IDs come back tagged skipped_quota in the stream and you can pick them up tomorrow.

Heads-up: the previous opt-in nightly auto-refresh sweep was retired on 2026-05-04. Refresh now only runs when you click it — sellers told us they wanted control over which listings got touched.

Dashboard widget

The Dashboard's Listing refresh card gives you an at-a-glance view of refresh activity:

• Today and this week counts, broken down by soft vs hard refreshes.
• Pending stale count — how many active listings still qualify as candidates.
• Last refresh timestamp — the most recent refresh you ran.
• Recent refreshes — a list of the most recently refreshed listings.

The "REFRESH STALE →" link in the top-right of the card jumps you straight to the Active tab on Listings, with the Stale (zero views) filter pre-applied. The widget hides itself for users on tiers below Seller (where the feature isn't available).

What gets refreshed

The staleness math runs every day after the view-snapshot sweep and flags a listing as a soft candidate when:

• It's an active eBay listing (DRAFT, ENDED, SOLD don't qualify).
• It's been live for at least 14 days (avoids touching listings still inside eBay's new-listing boost window).
• It has had 0 views in the last 30 days (calculated from daily HitCount snapshots from eBay).
• It hasn't been soft-refreshed in the last 14 days (cooldown period to avoid spamming Cassini).

Hard candidates are a strict subset of soft candidates — they additionally require a soft refresh at least 30 days ago that didn't move the needle.

Why this works

Cassini's biggest ranking signals (in order):

1. Title keyword match — the strongest single signal.
2. Item specifics completeness — structured attributes eBay can index.
3. Sell-through rate.
4. Price competitiveness.
5. Engagement (views, watchers, conversions).
6. Seller performance (Top Rated, defect rate).
7. Listing freshness — smaller factor, but real.

Soft refresh moves levers 1, 2, and 4 in a single action. Hard refresh adds lever 7 (and bumps engagement potential by landing in the new-listing boost window) at the cost of resetting your existing engagement signals on that listing.

Tier requirements

• Soft refresh (single + bulk via the Active-tab toolbar): Seller, Pro, or Enterprise.
• Hard refresh: Pro or Enterprise.
• Dashboard widget: Seller, Pro, or Enterprise (hidden silently on Free / Collector).

See Pricing for full tier comparison.