Microsoft Cancels Bing Cashback Program

pjfontillas writes "Yusuf Mehdi, Senior Vice President of Microsoft's Online Audience Business Group, recently announced, 'One of the principles we have here at Bing is to constantly experiment and learn. We do this to ensure we are keeping pace with new social and technology trends, and can continue to deliver great value for our customers and advertisers. As part of this "test-and-learn" mentality, we will be retiring the Bing cashback feature, which means that the last day you can earn cashback will be July 30, 2010.' From the look of the comments, Microsoft has at least 35 saddened users. eWeek does a follow-up attempting to explain the situation in more detail."

Duh!

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

MS tried the same thing with their "passport" single-sign-on-shopping system back in the dotcom boom days. It didn't work then either. People only used it for the money and ignored it otherwise. You would think they could learn from their own mistakes. I'm surprised it took them 2 years to figure it out this time around, it must have been a massive cash suck the way people like those on fatwallet have been milking it. Funny thing about that - the only reason I even knew about bing cashback is because of fatwallet. Whatever other means of advertising they used, it sure didn't make it to my ears.

Re:Bing

[Cthefuture]

That might be true for some stuff but for example when buying from Newegg the price is the same but you get the Bing discount. Also when doing Ebay.

There are often sales of items and many of us use Cashback to make those deals even sweeter. It really is a discount in many cases. Actually, I have personally never seen what you are talking about where it's the same price with or without Cashback. Usually I find the cheapest price then use Cashback to make it even cheaper.

Re:It was a scam

[inKubus]

Google Checkout was giving cash discounts and free shipping for a while. It's nothing very new. But yeah, it didn't convince me to use Bing. Although I do use it on the iPhone, I find their maps are much more accurate than the built-in Google maps. Sometimes Google would put me miles away from where I was when using the location feature. I've used them on Blackberry also with AT&T and it sucked as well, so it could just be AT&T location services. But Bing has always worked, and it also has the voice query which is really very good, better than Google's as well. It just seems to know what I'm looking for whereas Google takes a few tries. But the app is dog slow ;) I wish I could go back to my Verzion, say what you will about VZW, their cell navigator is awesome.

Yeah, but the cashback was often your own money

[aklinux]

Those 35 disappointed users must have forgotten how several of the merchants that signed up to give the Bing discounts could afford to do so. Show up with a Bing cookie and the price went up. http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/11/24/0112201/Bing-Cashback-Can-Cost-You-Money [slashdot.org]

Just as unsustainable as Google cash back

[kriston]

Just as unsustainable as Google cash back was back a few Christmas seasons ago, where I was awarded $20 for every purchase transaction for no apparent reason. I will enjoy my $280 and $320 dual-core, wide-screen laptops courtesy of Bing.com, too. *sniff*

Re:And no one cared

[Kakari]

Perhaps your IT department pushed IE7/8 with an automated installation script so that it 'just worked' rather than coming up with a post-install setup wizard. Firefox could then have grabbed your search engine default. If you muck with your hosts file Windows defender will flag it as a 'potential hosts file hijack' and, again depending on your IT department, may have set it to automatically clean it. Hope that helps with the mystery (or at least leads to new ones :) !