How to Connect BigCommerce to Bing Shopping

Three ways to connect BigCommerce to Bing Shopping

1. BigCommerce's own channels and apps

BigCommerce and Microsoft offer a free Microsoft Ads and Listings app that syncs your catalog to Microsoft Merchant Center for free listings and shopping ads, launched for stores in the US, UK, Australia, and New Zealand. It covers Microsoft only.

2. Export a file yourself

BigCommerce can export your products to a CSV (Products > Export), but the file uses BigCommerce's own template and columns - not the field names and formats Bing Shopping expects - and it's a snapshot, so it's out of date as soon as a price or stock level changes. If you go this way, start from our free Bing Catalog CSV Template Generator so at least the columns are right.

3. A store catalog connector

A connector reads your BigCommerce catalog through BigCommerce's REST API, using a read-only API account you create in your control panel, and builds the Bing Shopping feed for you. BigCommerce can notify a connector through webhooks when a product, price, or stock level changes, so updates arrive within moments - and only the products that changed need to be read again. The connector hosts the feed at a URL that Bing Shopping reads on a schedule, and one connection can usually feed several platforms at once.

What Bing Shopping needs

• A Microsoft Advertising account with a Microsoft Merchant Center store, and your domain verified through Bing Webmaster Tools or a UET tag.
• Seven fields per product: id, title, description, link, image_link, price, and shipping (required only in Germany and Austria).
• Optional extras like brand, gtin, and product_category - which uses the same Google product category list.
• Regular refreshes - Microsoft Merchant Center items expire after 30 days unless they're updated.

How your BigCommerce fields map to Bing Shopping

The table above shows where each Bing Shopping field comes from in your BigCommerce catalog. A few BigCommerce details need extra care:

• Variants: each combination of options (Navy / M, Navy / L...) should become its own listing with its own price, stock, SKU, and image, grouped under the product with a shared item_group_id. Name your options Color and Size so they're read as color and size, and leave out variants with purchasing disabled.
• Product type: BigCommerce categories are what you map to a Google product category. Stores often reuse a name under different parents (Men > Shirts, Women > Shirts), so map by the full path, and skip shopping groups like "Sale" or "New".
• Identifiers and condition: BigCommerce has Brand, GTIN, UPC, MPN, and Condition fields - fill them in and they come straight across. Products without a brand need a default, usually your store's name.
• Clothing details: BigCommerce has no gender or age group fields, and Google and Facebook require them - with a color and a size - on clothing and shoes. Add them as custom fields, or set them by product name if your tool supports it.
• Prices and tax: if your store enters prices with tax included, check what Bing Shopping expects for each country - US listings, for example, are shown without tax.

Step by step

1. Get your Bing Shopping account ready - see "What Bing Shopping needs" above.
2. Create a read-only API account. In your BigCommerce control panel, go to Settings > Store-level API accounts and click Create API account. Set Products and Information & settings to Read-only, leave the rest at None, and save. Copy the API path, access token, and client secret - BigCommerce shows them only once.
3. Optionally add categories. Microsoft doesn't require product_category, but adding one from the Google product category list helps your products show for the right searches.
4. Add the feed in Microsoft Merchant Center. In Microsoft Advertising, go to Tools > Merchant Center, select your store, and add a feed that Microsoft downloads on a schedule from your feed URL. If your products are already in Google Merchant Center, you can import them instead.
5. Check the first import. Review the errors Bing Shopping reports and fix them in BigCommerce, not in the feed - your store stays the single source of truth.

Common BigCommerce to Bing Shopping problems

• Hidden, disabled, and price-hidden products. Only visible products a shopper can buy at a shown price belong in the feed - hide a product, turn off purchasing, or hide its price in BigCommerce and it should drop out.
• Digital products and headless storefronts. Digital products aren't sold through shopping catalogs. If shoppers buy on a separate headless storefront, product links must point there, not to your BigCommerce store address.
• Products disappearing after a month. Items expire after 30 days, so a one-time upload quietly empties out. Use a scheduled feed.
• Links rejected. Every product link must be under your store's verified URL. See How to Import a Google Merchant Feed Into Bing for the Google import route.

Related guides

For more on Bing Shopping itself, see How to Import a Google Merchant Feed Into Bing. On a different store platform? WooCommerce to Bing Shopping, PrestaShop to Bing Shopping, Wix to Bing Shopping, Square to Bing Shopping, Squarespace to Bing Shopping, and Webflow to Bing Shopping cover the same setup for those stores.