Bing Shopping Feeds

Bing Shopping is a service for searching and discovering products that brings products from multiple sellers together on a single platform. It is largely identical to the Google Shopping, and you can submit to Bing Shopping a product feed created for Google Shopping.

The main task of the Bing Shopping is to provide a global shopping service to help customers with the tasks of product search, comparison and buying. The results this service proposes are the shopping feeds on Bing and on the other sites included in the Bing search network. Additionally, the products are shown in the Bing Shopping Tab, which is available in selected countries.

In order to use Bing Shopping for product placement, merchant needs to register his store on Microsoft Merchant Center. From there a store owner can opt in the Product Listings offering, which enables your products to be displayed on the Bing Shopping Tab. For current users of a Microsoft Shopping Campaigns service, there’s no action required to participate in Merchant Center and all approved offerings will automatically be opted into it.

Microsoft encourages merchants to provide a full and detailed Bing shopping feed for their products including all additional fields to take full advantage of Product Listings.

To connect the product catalog of your store with the Microsoft Bing Shopping service you need to first verify the website ownership on the Bing Webmaster Tools. For those users that already have added a Universal Event Tracking (UET) tag to their domain, it can be used for ownership validation. Otherwise follow this procedure:

• Load the Bing Webmaster Tools in browser
• Log in with the Microsoft account which is used in Microsoft Advertising
• In your Microsoft account click on the button Profile and fill the fields About Me, Contact Preference, Alert Preference
• Navigate to My Sites tab and provide the URL of your online store
• You will be proposed with three variants of ownership validation. Select one and after its execution click Verify
• Successful verification will be shown on the Dashboard page

Log in to the Microsoft Advertising service and create your store in Microsoft Merchant Center. You are allowed to have multiple stores, but each of them is required to have unique products. You are not allowed to sell identical items in different stores.

When you've installed Omega Shopping Feeds plugin open its main page and visit Feeds tab. This tab shows the list of all created product feeds for different shopping engine. Since you are free to modify any feed there can be multiple shopping feeds for one shopping engine.

To create a feed click on the Add feed button and from the list select the marketplace the feed is designated to. Click button Choose Marketplace on the shopping service you need to create the feed for. In this case it is Bing.

General configuration

Here is a brief Bing shopping feed description. A standard Bing shopping product feed requires you to input general information regarding the feed. This section requires setting feeds internal name to be displayed in the list of feeds and other places. Additionally, you can specify a brief description of the feed to provide more information.

Set the unique filename for the feed file, for example bing_shopping.xml. This name will be used in the feed URL.

You may need to specify category mapping if the internal taxonomy of your store doesn't fully correspond to the taxonomy of the Bing Shopping. Category mapping is explained explicitly in the Omega Shopping Feeds manual.

When your product feed has too many items it may be rejected by the marketplace. So our module provides an option to limit the number of items in the feed. For most of the stores it is note the case since Microsoft Merchant Center allows to upload feeds with millions items.

You can simply limit the maximal number of products per feed's file. If you definitely need to make a Bing shopping feed upload with the number of items that is above the limit you can contact the support of Merchant Center and ask to increase the limit for your account.

Lastly, select whether this particular feed should be active.

Applied filters

In this section specify filters to remove irrelevant products to this feed. For example, you may want to exclude items with zero price, with no picture, out of stock, etc.

Microsoft Merchant Center has a strict rule on product availability: you are mandated to remove the items which are currently out-of-stock before uploading you product feed to this service. Omega Shopping Feeds module allows you to exclude such products with the help of the respective filter.

Click on the filter to activate it for the particular product feed. Filter creation process in details is shown in the Omega Shopping Feeds manual.

Marketplace Info

In this section specify the information regarding the feed that can not be fetched automatically. For the Bing Shopping you can provide the same information as for the Google Shopping feed :

• Google Product Collection
• Gender of customers of the products in the feed
• Age Group of the customers

Google Analytics

Google Analytic allows tracking of the ad campaigns in external networks, like Microsoft Ads. Specify UTM codes that our module will add to URLs of your products. Set the campaign source name, campaign medium and campaign name. Omega Shopping Feeds manual.

Save the feed

When all necessary information was provided scroll the page up and click the Save button. In the splash notification press link Generate Feed to finish the feed creation process.

Here is Bing shopping data feed requirements a Microsoft Merchant Center makes for the filesize of the feeds depending on the uploading mechanism:

• manual upload for files under 4MB
• uploading by FTP/SFTP for files up to 1GB
• automatic download from feed URL for files under 1GB

Additionally, a shop owner can upload an existing Google Shopping feed by using a Google Merchant Center import tool.

Omega Shopping Feeds module supports the most common of the provided uploading mechanisms: feed URL generation and FTP/SFTP uploading. You can also upload the generated feed manually if it satisfies the file size limit.

Uploading via FTP/SFTP

Microsoft recommends to use this option for feeds that have files with the size between 4 MB and 1 GB.

To obtain credentials for FTP/SFTP uploading follow the procedure:

• In the browser navigate to the Microsoft Advertising page
• On the global menu of this service click Microsoft Merchant Center
• Find your store and click on it
• Select the Feeds tab of your store
• Locate the feed you wish to upload and click on it
• Click on the button Update feed
• Select the update method via FTP/SFTP
• Click change FTP account and update your FTP credentials
• Return to the previous page and specify the feed file without the file extension
• Click Update feed

Use any comfortable to you program or command line to upload the file by the FTP/SFTP.

In the Omega Shopping Feeds navigate to the feed you need to upload and click Edit then click Upload feed button. Here you will need to specify the details of your SFTP or FTP account.

To upload the feed file via SFTP set the following information:

• Auto Upload: set time interval of the automatic feed uploading
• Protocol: SFTP
• Host: ftps://feeds.adcenter.microsoft.com
• Port: 19321
• User: username for SFTP or FTP account
• Password: password for SFTP or FTP account
• Upload directory: leave this field blank for Bing Shopping feed

Click the Save button to finish changes. Press Upload feed now to immediately send the product feed to the Merchant Center.

Manual upload

To manually upload the feed file you need to download it first. In your Shopify store navigate to the Omega Shopping Feeds app and switch to the Feeds tab. In the list of all feeds locate the product feed you wish to manually upload and click on it.

In the Feed Information section find the feed URL and download the xml file it provides to your local drive.

Next visit Microsoft Advertising page and in the the top menu of this site click Tools. In the menu that follows click on the Microsoft Merchant Center. Navigate to your store, click on it and then click the Feed management tab. Select the file’s associated feed checkbox and activate Manual. Provide the path to the xml file you have downloaded previously and upload it.

Automatic product feed downloading from feed URL

Microsoft merchant Center can automatically fetch product feed file by its URL. The file with the shopping feed will be automatically visited every 24 hours.

To configure uploading by URL follow the procedure:

• Navigate to your store in the Microsoft Merchant Center menu
• Click on the Feed management tab
• Select the feed you wish to be uploaded
• Click the Feed settings tab
• Under the Feed file option activate switch Automatically download file from URL and enter the feed URL

Specify the username and password if required to access the product feed file.

Upload from the Google Merchant Center

If you supply your product feed to the Google Merchant Center it may be easier for you to set up the Omega Shopping Feeds for uploading to Google Merchant Center, and then configure Microsoft Merchant Center to fetch data from it. Get detailed information on using the Google Merchant Center importing tool.

Get full information on Microsoft Bing shopping feed format specification and product data attributes in the Microsoft Shopping Campaigns help center.

Read the official tutorial on how to set up the Bing Shopping Campaigns.