Microsoft Advertising runs Shopping campaigns on Bing, and the same product feed is what Microsoft's shopping surfaces — Copilot among them — read to find products. Microsoft calls the store where that feed lives Microsoft Merchant Center.
The Microsoft Shopping feed channel type builds that feed: a channel whose columns follow the Google Merchant layout, because Microsoft reads a Google-formatted feed as-is.
What setup does — and doesn't — get you#
The most useful thing this article can tell you is that you may not need this channel:
- If you already run Google Shopping, Microsoft can import your Google Merchant Center store directly. That's a first-party Microsoft feature: you connect the two accounts once and Microsoft re-imports on a schedule of your choosing. No Renable channel, no second feed, nothing to maintain. If that covers you, use it. Its documented limits are worth knowing: one Google Merchant Center store per import, your store domains have to match, and imported offers expire after 30 days. [VERIFY: current import options in Microsoft Merchant Center — Microsoft has been reworking this flow.]
- What a Renable Microsoft channel adds is control and one place to work. Microsoft's own field requirements get checked here rather than discovered in Merchant Center; publishing goes through the same draft-and-publish flow as every other channel; your enriched titles, descriptions, and images flow to Microsoft exactly as they flow to Meta and Google; and the feed is yours to shape independently of whatever your Google feed happens to contain. If you don't run Google Shopping at all, this channel is the direct route.
- Creating this channel prepares a feed. It doesn't create or approve anything on Microsoft's side. Microsoft requires you to verify that you own your store's URL and to have your store approved before a feed can even be added, and it runs an editorial review on your first upload and on every later change to a title, description, price, availability, image URL, or product URL. Microsoft documents that review as taking up to 24 hours normally and up to 3 business days on a second pass — so publishing and seeing nothing for a day is the process working, not a fault.
- Copilot: your feed is what Microsoft's shopping surfaces read; Microsoft decides what they show. Microsoft's own framing is that feeds enable product discovery, while its separate commerce protocol is what enables transactions. So a good feed is the input. It is not a placement, and Copilot Checkout in particular is a separate setup — store settings, a payment-processor integration, and an eligibility gate that as of mid-2026 covers English-language merchants selling to US buyers in USD. Nothing you do in Renable performs any of that.
- There are no video ads on Microsoft from a feed. Microsoft's product feed has no video field at all, so there is nothing for a video to ride on. If someone tells you otherwise, they're describing a different network.
Creating the channel#
From a project's Channels section, create a channel and pick the Microsoft Shopping feed type. It seeds:
- The Google Merchant columns —
g:id,g:title,g:description,g:link,g:image_link,g:additional_image_link,g:availability,g:price,g:sale_price,g:brand,g:condition, the identifiers (g:gtin,g:mpn), categorisation (g:google_product_category,g:product_type),g:item_group_id, and the five custom labels — bound to your product data the same way the Google Shopping channel type binds them. - Two starter rules — availability drops to out of stock when a product's stock hits zero or its content is incomplete, and sale price fills only when a product is actually discounted.
- Output left at XML — Microsoft accepts XML only when it's Google-formatted, which is exactly what Renable writes, so nothing needs changing. Microsoft's other accepted shape is tab-separated text; if you switch the File format, switch it to TSV, not CSV.
On the Settings tab, the Used for card shows the channel declared for Microsoft with its always-on Shopping ads use — that's what drives the field checks — plus one add-on:
- Extra product images — the channel already carries
additional_image_link; toggling this add-on on is what starts checking it, asking for at least two images per product. Microsoft documents up to ten of them and states that it doesn't guarantee showing them, so treat this as making more images available, not as a format you're buying.
Microsoft also supports a supplementary feed (Microsoft calls it a supplemental feed): a side feed matched on product ID that updates a few fields on a feed you already send. Set Used as to Supplementary feed on the Microsoft row if that's what you're building — only the product ID is then required.
One thing Renable can't check for you here. Microsoft's supplemental feeds accept a short, closed list of fields: product ID, the five custom labels, title, description, promotion ID, size, and colour. Renable's supplementary handling is more relaxed than that — it keeps every other field optional but still checks any value you send — so a supplementary feed carrying, say, a price column will look perfectly healthy in Renable while Microsoft quietly ignores that column. Keep a Microsoft supplementary feed to the fields on Microsoft's list.
Delivering the feed#
Microsoft fetches your feed URL on a schedule. In Microsoft Merchant Center, add a feed using the automatically download file from URL option and paste the channel's feed URL — that's the only upload method Microsoft schedules for you, and the schedule can be daily, weekly, or monthly. Microsoft's other routes (manual upload, FTP) leave the refresh cadence for you to manage. See Connecting a channel to Meta, Google, or TikTok for where to find the channel's URL.
The 30-day rule is the one to remember. Microsoft expires a feed it hasn't re-fetched for 30 days, and its products stop publishing when it does. A live Renable channel keeps the URL current, so this bites when a channel is archived, when a feed URL changes, or when the scheduled download in Merchant Center was never set up.
If you compress the feed with the Compress feed file (.gz) switch, Microsoft accepts it — but its archives must contain exactly one file whose name matches the feed's configured name in Merchant Center. Leaving compression off avoids the question entirely.
Checking the output#
- Preview tab → Source view shows the exact file content per product.
- The Fields tab marks Microsoft's required fields and their fill rates from the latest render. A few of Microsoft's limits differ from Google's and are checked here: descriptions can run to 10,000 characters, availability values are written without underscores, and there's no
backordervalue. - Microsoft's image formats are narrower than Google's, and for most feeds that doesn't reach you. Microsoft documents BMP, GIF, EXIF, JPG, PNG, and TIFF — WebP isn't among them, though Google accepts it — and it wants images of at least 220 × 220 pixels (250 × 250 for clothing and shoes). Images Renable hosts for you are served as JPG or PNG, whatever format they arrived in, so an image column filled from your product content is already in a format Microsoft lists. The format list matters when a column is bound straight to your own image URLs — in that case, check a few of them in the Preview tab's Source view before you go live.
- Render results and warnings show on the Activity tab — see Channel events and troubleshooting.