Bing Shopping Account Denied!

[justinhill]

Having got into the swing of submitting feeds to Google I decided to do the same thing with Bing.

I registered with the 'adcenter' and then created a 'Shopping Account' on Sunday. The status was 'pending review'.

Just now I received an email from 'do-not-reply [at] microsoft.com' saying:

Your application for a Bing Shopping account under your adCenter account [removed] has been denied after our Fraud Operations review.

For further information as to why you were rejected, please refer to our Terms of Use, Product Restrictions or email Bing Shopping support.

Regards,
Bing Shopping Team

I don't think there's anything about us that would fail a 'fraud operations review'. Has anyone else had this happen and know what we can do about it? I've checked on the website and our account status is indeed 'Fraud Review Failed'. There seems to be no mechanism for re-submitting the application or finding out what's wrong.

By the way, the phrase 'Bing Shopping Support' in that email is a link to the email address 'freehelp [at] microsoft.com'. Isn't that a contradiction in terms?

Thanks
Justin

[Mike Hughes]

This would appear to be the key phrase:

For further information as to why you were rejected, please refer to our Terms of Use, Product Restrictions

It sounds as if you're selling something they don't approve of.

Mike

[leehack]

It seems a bit of a double standard that you can't sell dildos, yet their software can willingly shaft you whenever it feels like it!

[justinhill]

This would appear to be the key phrase:

It sounds as if you're selling something they don't approve of.

Mike

Mike, at this stage I haven't been able to submit any feeds to them. I suppose a human being (do Microsoft have any of these?) might have cruised my site... but we don't sell anything that would upset them. Besides, they'd be mad to make that choice at that stage because it should be based on the contents of the feed.

Justin

[justinhill]

An update to this: following the link 'product restrictions' in the email takes me to:

http://advertising.microsoft.com/sma.../bing-shopping

(redirected from the destination linked in the email) where it says:


Important Announcement:

We have temporarily paused the onboarding of new merchants while we do some back-end optimization work.

This will not affect normal operation of the program – we will continue to display offers from merchants already live in the program.

Although we do not yet have a firm date when we will resume onboarding new merchants, we expect to do so soon and encourage all prospective merchants to check back frequently.

So I suppose it's possible that it's something at their end. However if this is true then I think it's a bit much to send me an email saying I've failed their 'fraud check' when they should be telling me their system is down.

And since when was 'onboarding' a word?

Justin

[justinhill]

OK, so it seems the forum post I read recently (which I can't now find; I think it was on auctionbytes somewhere) that said bing was now allowing UK merchants to upload feeds was wrong. It's still US-only.

Nice of Microsoft to allow me to register with a Limited Company name and select 'UK' from the drop-down, enter a full UK address and phone number and then send me an email saying I was fraudulent because of it.

It would have saved me a grey hair or two if they'd sent me an email along the lines of thanks but no thanks rather than making me think I was in some sort of trouble... Funny thing is that my first thought was that the email was a virus/spam so I checked the headers carefully before deciding it was from MS.

Pity. I'd done some neat work in my mega-worksheet to add bing support to my uploads.

Justin

[PatchworkRabbit]

Sorry, totally OT but "paused the onboarding of new merchants".

Onboarding? Seriously?