Microsoft Shopping feed for Shopify

Microsoft Merchant Center reads a tab-delimited plain-text file (TXT, or a ZIP, GZ or TAR.GZ archive of one) with a single header row, no quotes around values and no HTML. A file that breaks these rules is not processed at all. A hosted URL is downloaded once every 24 hours on the daily, weekly or monthly schedule you set; manual uploads are capped at 4 MB.

Feedflock renders exactly this layout and hosts it on a stable URL, regenerating it every hour. Items expire 30 days after the last upload, so a feed that stops refreshing takes your ads down with it. Fetch tracking shows Microsoft's last download and warns you when it stops.

The column set mirrors a Google feed (Microsoft accepts and uses Google's attribute names), but the details are Microsoft's. Availability knows only in stock, out of stock and preorder, spelled with spaces, and there is no backorder; an omitted value silently means in stock, which is why the template always sends it. The description may run to 10,000 characters where Google stops at 5,000, and identifier_exists is TRUE or FALSE rather than yes or no.

Microsoft's category list is Google's product taxonomy as of September 2021, with the same IDs. The template sends it in Google's google_product_category column, which Microsoft reads as its own product_category: a full path separated by >, or the numeric ID, which survives renames and works in any language.

Microsoft wants all three identifiers for products that have a GTIN, brand plus mpn for products without one, and identifier_exists set to FALSE for goods that have none of the three (handmade, custom or antique), so the missing codes are not held against them. MPNs are assigned by the manufacturer, so the template leaves mpn empty rather than sending your SKU.

Variants of one product share item_group_id (up to 50 characters and different from id), and the group must carry at least one variant attribute; the template fills color and size from your Shopify options. Titles cap at 150 characters, and Microsoft recommends naming colour or size in the title, which the default product-plus-variant title does.

Price is a number with two decimals, a space and the ISO 4217 code (23.99 USD), and must equal the landing-page price, which Microsoft verifies. Microsoft's tax policy covers five countries: VAT included for Australia, Germany, France and the United Kingdom, sales tax excluded for the United States. Feedflock sends the price exactly as your Shopify storefront shows it.

Shipping is one or more country:service:price groups with a bare number and no currency, such as DE:Standard:4.90, or 0 for free shipping. It is required for feeds targeting Germany or Austria and optional elsewhere; you type it once in the shipping mapping. Microsoft has no free-above-a-threshold attribute. Every change to price or availability puts the item back into review for up to 24 hours.