Product feed, time to take to get listed?

Does anyone have a general idea how long it takes for product feed to start showing up in the Bing Products search results?

It's been five weeks since I uploaded a feed, it has been verified to be good and also Bing has been updating the feed periodically.

 

It should not take five weeks. Two weeks at most.

How are you checking if your products are live and how was your feed verified?

 

Well, even though the merchant center stated the feed was 'OK' and indicated no problem, the feed was in fact incorrect. The feed was missing a CR before the LF. (characters at the end of a line to indicate to make a new line)

The microsoft tech stated 14 day 'till items will start showing up now.

 

You probably just need to call them. I have had nothing but a bad experience with Microsoft since they teamed up with Yahoo so don't expect much.

 

Yeah the Catalog Feeback section in the merchant center is inaccurate and their shopping feed processing system is very fragile. Any line breaks or HTML throws a wrench into the whole thing.

While you're waiting your second 14 days you can optimize your MerchantCategory column to increase your traffic.

I don't have the ability to post links yet but if you reply with your top level category(s) I can copy and past Bing Shopping's taxonomy. Or you can just PM me and I'll send you the document.

For example, Office Products>Tape & Adhesives>Tape Dispensers is better than just Office Products.

Andrew

 

Yep, I have the feed decently filled with information...

MerchantProductID, Title, Price, ProductURL, ImageURL, B_Category, Brand, Availability, Condition, MerchantCategory, Description

For the b_category I am using "Home Furnishings > Home Lighting > Indoor Lighting > Indoor Lamps & Lights" for my particular product line.

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TheFind's product feed you can really add some good information too! For others looking for a good places to feed products to that are free so far I only found Google, Bing, and TheFind.

 

Change the information you're using in your B_Category to your MerchantCategory. The B_Category is basically a top level category requirement while the MerchantCategory acts more like the traditional category column, kind of like bumpers in a bowling alley.

 

Shopmania.com has very competitive CPC rates and lets you list about 10% of your inventory for free.

You should try out one or two paid engines like Nextag or Amazon Product Ads, there is substantial management involved though especially for the lighting categories.