Yes indeed. Every merchant needs a Microsoft adCenter Account to participate in the Bing Shopping Program. In order to create an account, go to Microsoft adCenter by clicking on the link http://adcenter.microsoft.com/ and click the blue Sign Up Now button.

Bing Shopping is absolutely Free of all costs. However, you will have to give your credit card/debit card details during registration for the registration to be completed successfully and the account to get activated.

Bing Shopping is strictly restricted to merchants domiciled in US. Thus of course not. However, if you do have a US Employer Identification Number (EIN) you can still proceed ahead for making use of Bing services.

The “OK” status is given as a confirmation of receiving your feed by our system. The feed is under processing and yet to be approved. Only after approval your products will be listed in the site. Be patient and wait for the approval mail. If you still do not see the products listed in the next 10 days, contact us.

Initially the data feed you provide us via FTP is cross checked with current products on the site. If in case an item is removed from the feed, it will be consequentially removed from the site as well. Similarly if an item’s price is changed, it is also incorporated accordingly to the site. Product offerings stay on the site even if there isn’t a merchant selling that particular product and yet they are accessible through search function. On adding an item to their respective data feed the offerings becomes active in the site. A customer can add a bookmark the link of a particular page listing the particular product, if they wish to access an out of stock item

The accepted formats for data feeds are,

1. Uncompressed text (bingshopping.txt)

   
   

2. ZIP compressed (bingshopping.zip)

   
   

3. GZIP compressed (bingshopping.txt.gz)

Feed Format Requirements are :

1. Header row is a must. Refer to Data Feed Attributes Quick Chart.




2. Every line should contain only one product listing.




3. It is a must to have 5 columns in every data feed. It is also advisable to have additional 3 columns.




4. TAB-delimited




5. File Type should be DOSWindows which should support character set/encoding UTF-8.




6. New data feed will overwrite previously uploaded product data. Incremental update features are not supported by Bing at present.




7. Merchants ought to upload new data feed at least once in 30 days or at the most once per day.

You can upload your data feed at ftp://feeds.adcenter.microsoft.com using FTP client. Data feed cannot be uploaded via Microsoft online Merchant Center Account. FTP password is a must and in case you forget it, the password can be reset by contacting support.

A merchant is allowed to upload feeds only once per day. There is no need to upload more than one feed within 24 hours as Bing’s indexes run only once every 24 hours. For incorporating changes to your earlier feed, wait for at least 48 hours for the changes to be incorporated to the site before you contact them. Do contact the support if in case issues develop or changes have not been implemented after 48 hours.

The MPID ID you assign to a product should be consistent between feed updates.

1. When the MPID is different for two different feeds, the site will publish both the offers.

   
   

2. Before submitting your feed, make sure to check whether every product in your feed is assigned a unique MPID and this ID is not repeated twice or more in the feed. Be sure to check that the same products are not repeated anywhere on the feed as well.

   
   

3. If you have subscribed to search service engine like PriceGrabber, see to that you inform Bing not to include you any longer in the Bing Shopping data feed.