Microsoft Merchant Center Feed Setup: A Step-by-Step Guide for 2026

Microsoft Merchant Center feed setup: the order that works

A Microsoft Merchant Center feed is the product data that Microsoft Advertising turns into Shopping ads and Product ads. Setup has six steps, and the order matters because each one blocks the next:

1. Verify your domain with Bing Webmaster Tools or a UET tag.
2. Create a store and wait for approval.
3. Build your feed file, or decide to import from Google Merchant Center instead.
4. Create a Primary feed and pick an input method.
5. Clear the first round of processing and review errors.
6. Set up how the feed refreshes, because feeds expire after 30 days.

The facts below come from Microsoft's own feed documentation, last updated 26 June 2026. Where a point is our reading of that documentation rather than a Microsoft statement, the text says so.

How to create a Microsoft Merchant Center store and get it approved

You cannot create a feed until a store exists and is approved. In Microsoft Advertising go to Tools > Merchant Center > Manage stores and select Create store. You will be asked to prove you own the site through Domain validation, and there are two routes:

• Bing Webmaster Tools - verify the site there first.
• Universal Event Tracking (UET) tag - the tag must have registered at least 50 events before the domain shows up as an option.

After you save, the store is auto-approved, auto-rejected or queued for manual review. Manual review can take up to five days and you get an email with the decision.

Three details that catch people out:

• The domain cannot be changed after the store is created, and product links must sit under the store's destination URL. Choose the canonical domain you actually serve products from (our reading of the rule).
• Only one active store per domain is allowed. A duplicate is rejected.
• You may run several stores, but not the same products through more than one of them.

Microsoft lists these as store rejection reasons: an unverified domain, no presence in a market supported for Product ads, no real privacy policy on the site, a non-SSL checkout, a duplicate store, and adult advertisers. You can request one review per store from Summary > Product issues, so fix the cause before you use it.

What format does a Microsoft Merchant Center feed file need?

The default format is not CSV. Microsoft expects tab-delimited plain text with a TXT extension, or an archive of it (ZIP, GZ, GZIP, TAR.GZ, TGZ). XML is accepted only when it is an existing Google-formatted XML file. If the file breaks any of the rules below, it is not processed at all:

• One header row, then one product per line.
• File name with no spaces and at most 50 characters.
• No HTML in any value.
• No trailing tabs at the end of lines, and no tabs or line breaks inside a value.
• For archives, exactly one file inside, with a matching name.

A minimal feed looks like this (columns are separated by tab characters, and the values are illustrative):

id	title	description	link	image_link	price	availability	condition	brand	gtin
SKU-1001	Merino Wool Crew Sweater, Navy, Men's Medium	Navy 100% merino wool crew neck sweater for men, size medium, machine washable.	https://www.example.com/p/sku-1001	https://www.example.com/img/sku-1001.jpg	89.00 USD	in stock	new	Contoso	00012345600012

If your team already keeps a Google Shopping feed, Microsoft also accepts Google-format feed files, so you may not need to build a second file from scratch. The next sections cover both routes. Microsoft's guide to creating and organizing feed files is the reference for these rules.

Required attributes for a Microsoft Merchant Center feed

Six attributes are required for every product. Identifiers are required whenever the manufacturer assigned a value, and apparel has extra requirements in four countries.

Availability (in stock, out of stock, preorder) and condition (new, used, refurbished) are optional and default to in stock and new. Microsoft's product attributes reference holds the full list of optional fields.

How to create the feed in Merchant Center and submit the file

Once the store is approved, go to Tools > Merchant Center > Feeds and follow these steps:

1. Select Create feed and enter a feed name.
2. Set the Feed type to Primary feed.
3. Choose Destinations: Online Product ads, Local inventory ads, or both.
4. Choose the Feed label or Country of sale. If you add more countries, also set a default currency.
5. Pick an Input method and select Create feed.

The input method is the decision that shapes your maintenance workload:

Once submitted, processing usually finishes within minutes, though large files can take several hours. Editorial review can take up to 24 hours, and an item that fails the first pass gets a second review of up to three business days.

If your platform cannot produce a tab-delimited file, or the catalog needs different rules per market, this is the point where hand-editing spreadsheets stops scaling. Our product feed management service builds and maintains Microsoft Merchant Center feeds alongside Google, Meta and Pinterest catalogs.

How to import your Google Merchant Center feed into Microsoft

If Google Shopping is already running, the import tool is the fastest route. Create the Microsoft store first, then open Tools > Merchant Center, select the store, open the Import tab and choose New import. Sign in to Google, then pick Now for a one-time run or a daily, weekly or monthly schedule.

What the import does and does not carry over:

• It imports online offers with a Shopping destination. In-store-only offers and other destinations are skipped.
• It imports every offer, including pending and disapproved ones, and keeps the feed label from Google.
• Only markets and languages that Microsoft supports for Shopping campaigns are imported.
• Everything lands in its own Google Import feed.
• Imported offers expire after 30 days, so the import must run at least that often.

Two practical points. Because disapproved offers come across too, clean up Google diagnostics first or you will import the same problems (our reading of the rule). And use Find and replace string in URL to change tracking parameters, for example swapping google for bing in your UTM source so clicks are attributed correctly.

The store domain in Google must match the domain of the Microsoft store, otherwise the import fails with a store domain mismatch. If the import reports an authorization error, use Change account and sign in with the same Google account again, which usually happens after a Google password change.

How often should a Microsoft Merchant Center feed update?

A feed expires after 30 days, and products stop publishing when it does. Microsoft's own advice is to upload daily. Item-level expiration_date can be at most 30 days out, and it defaults to 30.

The URL method is the only one with built-in scheduling. With FTP/SFTP, manual upload or anything else, you own the schedule.

Update speed differs by field: price and availability changes take up to 24 hours to process, shipping changes up to 8 hours, and a product deletion up to 12 hours. Microsoft recommends setting an item to out of stock before deleting it.

The practical consequence (our interpretation) is that your landing page price can change before Microsoft's copy does. Since the feed price must match the landing page, stores that run frequent flash sales should avoid price changes that flip several times a day, and should keep structured data markup on product pages current.

Test feeds and supplemental feeds

Turn on Use feed for testing only to validate a file without publishing it. Validation errors appear, and nothing serves. There is one trap: if you enable testing on an existing live feed, all previously submitted offers are deleted and stop serving within a few hours. Create a separate test feed instead.

A supplemental feed lets you override specific fields without touching the primary file. It matches on feed label (or country of sale), language and Product ID. It supports Product ID, custom labels 0 to 4, title, description, promotion ID, size and color. It can change existing products but cannot add or delete them, so it is a good fit for custom labels and title tests on top of a Google import.

Why Microsoft Merchant Center rejects or delays products, and how to fix it

The pattern behind most of these is that Microsoft checks the feed against your live site. The feed and the product page have to agree, which is why one-off spreadsheet exports drift out of sync so easily.

When to hand your Microsoft Merchant Center feed setup to a specialist

A single-market store with a few hundred products and a platform that exports cleanly can follow this guide and be live in a day or two. Outside store approval, the time usually goes into keeping the feed accurate month after month. It gets harder when:

• your platform cannot export a tab-delimited feed with the required fields;
• you sell in several countries and need a feed label and currency per market;
• prices and stock change daily, and feed and page keep disagreeing;
• the same products need to go to Google, Meta and Microsoft with channel-specific rules;
• disapprovals keep coming back after you fix them by hand.

Netalith builds these feeds: field mapping from your platform, a hosted feed URL for Merchant Center to pull, and fixes for disapproved offers. Tell us your platform and roughly how many products you have through the free quote form and we will scope the work. It is priced to scope, so you get a number before committing.