Bing Shopping Merchants Must Have Secure Shopping Carts

Did you know that Bing checks to ensure the merchants in their Bing Shopping index have secure shopping cart and check out systems?

I spotted a thread at Bing Shopping Help where one merchant was rejected from the Bing Merchant program because his cart was not fully secure.

Justin from Microsoft explained:

It seems as if you have an unencrypted checkout system. The entire checkout procedure must be encrypted or we will be unable to Onboard you.

Please let me know if you encrypt your checkout and I will have it re-reviewed.

The issue with this specific merchant was the live chat feature was also embedded on the cart pages, and since the live chat had portions that were not SSL enabled, it caused the check out process to be insecure on some level. The webmaster resolved the issue and Bing then included the merchant in Bing Shopping.

I am not sure if Google Shopping requires the same level of security or not but it is nice to see Bing limit who they accept by this criteria. There are way too many shopping carts that do not use basic SSL services to protect the customers information. Of course, I doubt Bing checks to see if the SSL breaks later on - they may spot check...

Forum discussion at Bing Shopping Help.