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 updates them — rotating the title with fresh keywords, backfilling any newly-required item specifics, and optionally dropping the price. The end result: stale inventory starts showing up in search again, watchlist notifications fire, and dormant listings start selling.

One Refresh action, one dialog

There's a single Refresh action everywhere — the banner on a listing's detail view, the Refresh tab, and the bulk toolbar all open the same dialog. In it you make three choices:

1. The style — soft refresh (update the live listing in place) or hard refresh (end and relist as a new item).
2. Which attributes to update (soft refresh) — Title, Item specifics, and/or Price, via checkboxes.
3. The price decrease for this run — 0–25%, pre-filled from your saved default in Settings but adjustable per run.

Confirm, and the progress modal streams every listing's changes in real time.

Soft refresh vs Hard refresh

The style toggle in the dialog has two options, with different trade-offs:

• Soft refresh is the default. It updates the live listing in place — through eBay's Inventory API for listings RocketVault published, or eBay's Trading API for imported listings. Pick which attributes get updated with the dialog's checkboxes:

  • Title — rotates the title with AI-optimized keywords (anchored to your card data so it never invents facts).
  • Item specifics — backfills any missing eBay item specifics that have become required since you first published.
  • Price — drops the price by the percentage you set in the dialog, and notifies anyone watching.

  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 relists it as a brand-new eBay item with a fresh item ID. The new listing lands inside Cassini's 48–72hr "new listing" visibility boost — search placement resets — but you lose:

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

  Hard refresh is available on demand for any active listing on Seller, Pro, or Enterprise — pick it in the Refresh dialog whenever you want a fresh start, you don't have to wait for the listing to qualify. RocketVault still recommends it as an escalation (the Refresh tab and the listing's eligibility banner flag a listing as a hard candidate once a soft refresh from 30+ days ago hasn't moved views), but the recommendation is a nudge, not a gate. Hard refresh asks for a price decrease percentage too — the relisted price is clamped to your minimum listing price, so set 0% if you want the new item to go live at the exact same price.

Setting the price drop

The price decrease percentage is set per run, right in the Refresh dialog:

• The field is pre-filled from your saved default in Settings, but you can change it for any individual run — the default is a starting point, not a rule.
• The range is 0–25%. Set 0% if you only want the title and specifics rotated without touching the price; push it higher to clear sticky inventory faster.
• Every drop is clamped to your minimum listing price — RocketVault will never drop a $50 card to $1.99 because you fat-fingered a percentage.

Listings in an active eBay sale

eBay won't let anyone change the price of an item that's enrolled in a sale event (a Promotions Manager markdown). When a refresh hits one of those listings, RocketVault skips just the price and still rotates the title and backfills item specifics — the refresh succeeds, and the listing is flagged "price skipped (active eBay sale)" so you know why the price held. To move the price too, end the sale or remove the item from it on eBay first. Note that eBay can take a little while to release the lock even after a sale ends, so a price refresh right afterward may still be skipped — give it a bit and run it again.

Watching a refresh happen — the progress modal

When you confirm the Refresh dialog, 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 (when the Title checkbox is on).
• Updating item specifics — adding any newly-required fields (when the Item specifics checkbox is on).
• Adjusting price — applying the drop with a before/after value (when the Price checkbox is on).
• 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 Cards page (Vault → All Cards in the sidebar). 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 refreshed too — they're revised in place through eBay's Trading API. By default an imported listing gets a price refresh; its title and item specifics are only rewritten when you explicitly tick those checkboxes, since you authored them on eBay.

Per-listing refresh history

Open any active listing from the Active tab 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.

Eligible listings also display an Eligibility banner at the top of the detail view — "Eligible for soft refresh: 60 days listed, 0 views in 30d" — with an inline Refresh button that opens the same Refresh dialog, so you can pick the style, attributes, and price drop without leaving the listing.

"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 Cards page. It only renders the listings the staleness service has flagged — so you're never sifting through healthy, viewed listings.

Daily caps

Refresh has per-tier daily caps to keep eBay's anti-abuse layer happy and to keep marginal cost in line with your plan. There are two stacked caps:

• A combined cap that every refresh — soft or hard — counts against.
• A separate, tighter hard-refresh cap, because a hard refresh ends and relists the item (resetting watchers and the view counter), so it's the more expensive lever. A hard refresh counts against both caps. Hard refresh requires eBay publishing, so the hard cap is 0 on Free and Collector (which can't publish to eBay at all).

Both counters reset at 00:00 UTC. The bulk toolbar shows each cap you can use — "X of Y refreshes left today" and, when you're hard-refreshing, "X of Y hard refreshes left today" — so you can size a run before you trigger it. If you select more listings than slots remaining, the API runs only the first N and tags the over-quota IDs skipped_quota in the stream so 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 the Cards page, 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): Seller, Pro, or Enterprise.
• Hard refresh: Seller, Pro, or Enterprise.
• Dashboard widget: Seller, Pro, or Enterprise (hidden silently on Free / Collector).

See Pricing for full tier comparison.