The Microsoft Advertising product feed: Bing Shopping, the Google import, and when you need a feed of your own

Your Google Shopping campaigns run. Someone asks why the same products are not on Bing. You open Microsoft Advertising and it asks for a product feed. You already have one. Does Microsoft take it?

Yes, two ways. One takes ten minutes and has a catch. The other is a feed built for Microsoft. Here is how to tell which one you need, what Microsoft checks that Google does not, and the one rule that silently switches your products off.

The ten-minute route: let Microsoft import your Google feed

Microsoft Merchant Center can import a Google Merchant Center store directly. You connect the two accounts once, and Microsoft re-imports on a schedule you pick: once, daily, weekly or monthly. No second feed, nothing to host, nothing to maintain. If you run Google Shopping and want a first look at Bing, start here.

The catch is in the limits. One Google store per import. The store domains have to match. And the imported offers expire after 30 days, so a monthly schedule that slips by a day takes the products down. Microsoft has been reworking this flow, so check its own import guide for what your account offers today.

The deeper catch is that Microsoft reads your Google feed as it is. The titles are the ones you wrote for Google. The images are the ones Google accepts. Nothing is checked against Microsoft’s rules until Microsoft rejects it.

Where Microsoft’s rules differ from Google’s

Microsoft reads a feed in Google’s format, with Google’s column names. That is why the import works at all. The values inside those columns follow Microsoft’s rules, and five of them catch Google stores out.

• No WebP images. Microsoft lists BMP, GIF, EXIF, JPG, PNG and TIFF. Google accepts WebP, and many stores serve nothing else. Those products import with an image Microsoft cannot show. Microsoft also wants at least 220 by 220 pixels, and 250 by 250 for clothing and shoes.
• Availability without underscores. Google reads in_stock. Microsoft reads in stock, and has no backorder value at all.
• XML or tab-separated, never CSV. A Google-formatted XML feed is accepted as it is. If you upload a text file, it has to be tab-separated.
• Longer descriptions, if you want them. Microsoft reads up to 10,000 characters. A description cut to fit Google’s limit is fine. One written for Microsoft can say more.
• No video. Microsoft’s feed has no video field. There is nothing for a product video to ride on, whatever a reseller tells you. Up to ten extra images per product, which Microsoft shows when it chooses to.

The 30-day rule that switches products off

Microsoft expires a feed it has not fetched for 30 days, and the products stop publishing when it does. This is the single most common reason a Microsoft store goes quiet. Someone uploaded a file by hand in September, the campaign ran, and in October every product disappeared with no email.

The fix is a feed at a URL that Microsoft fetches on its own schedule. In Merchant Center, add the feed with the “automatically download file from URL” option and set it to daily. That is the only upload route Microsoft schedules for you. Manual uploads and FTP leave the clock in your hands.

What happens after you publish

Two things on Microsoft’s side take time, and neither is a fault. Before a feed can be added at all, Microsoft requires you to verify that you own the store’s URL and to have the store approved. Then it runs an editorial review on the first upload, and again on every later change to a title, description, price, availability, image or product link. Microsoft says that takes up to 24 hours, and up to three business days on a second pass. Publishing and seeing nothing for a day is the process working.

The same feed is what Microsoft’s shopping surfaces, Copilot among them, read when they recommend products. A clean, complete feed makes your products available there. What they show is Microsoft’s decision, and buying inside Copilot is a separate program with its own store settings and eligibility.

A feed built for Microsoft, from the catalog you already have

Renable publishes a Microsoft Shopping feed next to your Google, Meta and TikTok feeds, from one import of your store. The Microsoft channel starts with Microsoft’s columns and checks every product against Microsoft’s rules before you publish, so a rejected image is a number on the Fields tab, not a review you find out about three days later.

• Images in a format Microsoft takes. Bind the image column to the product image Renable processed and Microsoft gets JPG or PNG, with your store’s original as the fallback. The WebP problem goes away without touching the store.
• A hosted URL that never expires. The feed is re-read from your store every hour and the URL is always there for Microsoft’s daily fetch.
• Microsoft’s values, written Microsoft’s way. Availability without underscores, a starter rule that sets a product to out of stock at zero, a sale price that only appears when the product is on sale.
• Your enriched titles, on Bing too. The title rule you built for Google carries over, and a longer description written for Microsoft can be a rule of its own.

Already running a Microsoft feed from another tool? A supplementary feed updates a short, closed list of fields on it: product id, title, description, the five custom labels, promotion id, size and colour. Anything else in it is ignored, so keep a supplementary feed to that list.

Or ask Aimée, the AI agent inside Renable.

The setup details are in the help center: The Microsoft Shopping feed. See how Renable works with Microsoft Advertising