Bing Shopping Now Free To Merchants

Brian Smith reports that Bing Shopping is now free for merchants to submit their product feeds and obtain traffic from Bing. I tried to find information from Bing on this, but I guess it is not published yet.

We know Microsoft officially dropped the Cashback as of July 30, 2010. Brian said dropping Cashback and going free on August 1st is Microsoft’s plan to compete closer to Google’s free product search.

Microsoft does have some advertising information on Bing Shopping over here and merchants can submit a form to be included. In addition, if you download the PDF from Microsoft, it does say:

There is no cost to participate in the Bing Shopping program. Upload your feeds and have your products listed in Bing Shopping results with no cost per click or cost per sale.

This advertising page has been revamped and is new compared to what I see in the Google cache. The previous page just said, “contact a sales rep” to learn how to be included.

Finally, it seems Microsoft has opened up a new forum for Bing Shopping. There is currently a single “welcome” post in the forum.