infoTECH Feature

June 04, 2010

Cashback Program on Bing to Discontinue Though New Shopping Features May Be Announced Soon

Cashback on Bing is coming to an end due to insufficient adoption - even though the Microsoft (News - Alert) search engine feature had over a thousand merchant partners.
With a posting in a Bing blog, Microsoft announced today that it will be stopping the Bing cashback feature, which means it will end on July 30, 2010.
Until July 30th at 9:00 pm PST, it's business as usual, with cashback offers still within Bing. After that, Bing cashback will discontinue, though users will have a year to redeem any cashback they have earned through cashback accounts consistent with existing terms and conditions.
In addition, Microsoft will provide users a year of customer support.
"When we originally began to offer the cashback feature, it was designed to help advertisers reach you with compelling offers, and to provide a new type of shopping experience that would change user behavior and attract a bunch of new users to Bing," Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president, Bing Online Audience (News - Alert) Business Group, wrote in a blog posting to users. "In lots of ways, this was a great feature - we had over a thousand merchant partners delivering great offers to customers and seeing great ROI on their campaigns, and we were taking some of the advertising revenue and giving it back to customers."
"But after a couple of years of trying, we did not see the broad adoption that we had hoped for," he added.
Microsoft says shopping remains one of the most important tasks people engage in while using search engines, and it expects to have some ideas for making it easy to get a broader array of products and offers into Bing. Details are expected to be released later this summer.
"So we are taking all the learning from the effort and putting it into some new programs for you and our advertisers - designed to provide amazing shopping experiences for consumers and great opportunities for advertisers," Mehdi said.
Bing cashback gave online shoppers cash rebates for buying products after searching for them on the search engine.
In one example, Wirefly, an Internet-based retailer of cell phones and plans, had a limited time offer earlier this year where customers could receive $100 in Bing cash back on every cell phone purchased.
 

Ed Silverstein is a contributing editor for TMCnet's InfoTech Spotlight. To read more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Patrick Barnard
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