Bing Shopping and Copilot for non-Shopify stores: Microsoft Merchant Center in 20 minutes

Bing Webmaster Tools: import from Google Search Console

1. Sign in to Bing Webmaster Tools with the same Google account you used for Search Console.
2. Choose Import from Google Search Console. Grant access, tick your site, import. Verification happens automatically — no DNS record, no meta tag — and the sitemap comes across with it.
3. Then go to Settings → API access and generate an API key. The URL Submission API lets you push a batch of product and page URLs for crawling instead of waiting; the quota is 100 URLs a day and 2,800 a month. We used it to submit every product and policy page the same afternoon.

If your store runs WordPress, Microsoft’s IndexNow plugin does the ongoing version of this: every time a product or page is saved, its URL is pinged to Bing. We installed it and re-saved all products and pages so each one was submitted once.

Why bother with any of this before Merchant Center? Because ChatGPT search draws on Bing’s index. A product page Bing has not crawled is invisible to that search, however good the feed.

Create the Microsoft Advertising account (without advertising)

Merchant Center lives inside Microsoft Advertising, so an advertising account has to exist even if you never run an ad. Go to ads.microsoft.com and sign up. Three settings deserve care:

• Location. Must match the business. For a US store, United States. It cannot be changed later; a wrong answer means starting over with a new account.
• Phone number. Required. Use one you can answer; Microsoft may verify.
• Business name and address. The legal business name and registered address — the same ones you gave Google. A mismatch between platforms, or between the name here and the entity that owns the domain, can block the account during review.

When the flow offers to build a first campaign, choose Create an account only. When it asks for billing, choose Set up payment later. Free listings never require the card; you can add one if you decide to advertise.

Merchant Center: import the store from Google

1. In Microsoft Advertising open Tools → Merchant Center and click Create store.
2. Choose Import an existing store from Google Merchant Center. A Google sign-in window opens. Safari blocks this pop-up by default and the button appears to do nothing; allow pop-ups for ads.microsoft.com in Safari’s website settings and click again. Chrome usually shows it.
3. Sign in with the Google account that owns Merchant Center and tick the Merchant Center account to import.
4. Review the store name and description Microsoft pulled across, set the contact email, and click Create store. The confirmation says the store is processed for approval, up to three business days.

Run the first import and leave the schedule on

Open the new store, go to Import, and click Import now so the products arrive without waiting for the schedule. Then confirm the daily import from Google Merchant Center is scheduled — ours runs at 12 AM Pacific. From here, any product, price or stock change flows store → Google feed → Google Merchant Center → Microsoft with no further work. One feed, two platforms.

Once the store is approved and products pass review, they are eligible to appear in Bing Shopping and in Copilot’s shopping results. Approval and placement are Microsoft’s decisions; the setup above is everything the merchant controls.

What tripped us up

• The pop-up. On Safari the Google sign-in for the import silently fails until pop-ups are allowed for ads.microsoft.com.
• The location field. It is permanent. Read it twice.
• Legal name versus brand name. Microsoft wants the entity; the brand goes in the store name inside Merchant Center.
• Campaign and billing prompts. They look mandatory. They are not: account only, payment later.
• Doing Merchant Center before Webmaster Tools. Both are quick, but Webmaster Tools is the one that affects ChatGPT search, so do it first while you are signed into the Google account.

Where this sits in the bigger picture

Microsoft is the second of the self-serve, no-cost surfaces a non-Shopify store can enter in a day. Google is first (same feed, more setup), Perplexity is a five-step form, and Meta Commerce Manager takes the same Google-format feed if you have a Facebook business login. ChatGPT is different: a waitlisted merchant application, or Shopify Catalog through Shopify’s free Agentic plan. The one-day checklist lays them side by side with what each platform gates and what only the merchant can do.