Microsoft Cancels Bing Cashback Program 124
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."
Bing (Score:5, Interesting)
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And they thought people would like yet another rebate plan, where you don't see the rebate until weeks later? Even if the rebate is set up automatically and there's nothing that has to be sent in, I'd much rather not pay the extra in the first place and not have to keep track of rebates.
Re:Bing (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd then do the same search on Amazon or go directly to the store site and get offfered the same deal except the price was just lower by the amount that Bing was offering for a cashback.
What's worse is that even when it was a little cheaper I'd go through a different site because I couldn't be bothered with signing up for the program, nor would I just make the purchase without signing up knowing that I was forfeiting the cashback deal.
People like me are what really screw up corporate marketing campaigns.
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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.
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The funny thing is that people here think that Bing or Microsoft actually paid anything or "paid" users to use Bing. Ebay, Amazon and all other stores and sites have affiliate programs. Bing just gave some of that affiliate money back to users it referred to those stores via Bing. The most funny thing is that as a huge traffic source, Bing got excellent commission rates. A much higher than what they gave back with the cash back program.
But sure go on and continue the oh-so-funny joke about Bing "having to p
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Re:Bing (Score:4, Interesting)
You really don't get it do you. Just like all the other B$ (lies for profit) marketing tools, everyone except the youngest or the most foolish have become accustomed to them. Any time I see cashback, my immediate thought is, yeah yeah, charge me extra and give some of it back, eventually 'er' maybe and, more often than not the product is going be crappy because they "need" gimmicks to sell it. So immediate reaction to product is negative, just put the offer out of consideration and when comparing it to competitors ignore the cash back .
Marketing is now down to factual product claims and warranty conditions, as well a consumer reported background on the companies actual ability to fulfil claims about their products and to provide real warranty services. Then I check the price and see often I will have to pay that price again, upgrade B$, end of warranty auto breakdown features, missing buts and pieces actually required to make use of the product and of course cost of using the product normal cost as well as bugs and defects costs.
It is commonly accepted corporate marketing tactics to lie about the product, to lie about it faults when the occur and, to blame customers for faulty products. In turn in is now commonly accepted consumer practice to accept most marketdroids are lying ass hats, just give me the technical details and urinate on your company board not me. Truth in advertising what a joke, it is about time a law was enacted to force companies to only make claims about provable product qualities and to institute random audits of the claims with full consumer refunds plus costs when those claims are proved false.
Re:Bing (Score:5, Interesting)
People like me are what really screw up corporate marketing campaigns.
Really? Because I think you may have fallen right into it with your post just now. I'm a member of several forums covering some diverse topics and the one thing I have noticed several members in all forums over the past year jump in saying "Btw guys just realised with this website you can get bing cashback on this camera" This entire scheme doesn't give me the vibes of paying people to use the search engine, but rather getting people to talk about using it in various unrelated forums. Although I admit that you're talking about bing right now in a bing related post, but did you ever talk about bing outside of slashdot due to this marketing campaign?
It seems to me a clever trick to get people to use Bing just to see what the savings may be. The people who probably never heard of Bing in the first place now must actually use the search engine. Some of them may like it and stay, some may have more sense.
Thanks, Captain Obvious (Score:2)
Wow, thanks for explaining that one. Although that was the expressed purpose of the cashback plan, I probably wouldn't have gotten it without this insightful post.
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I don't know what sites you looked at, but this was never the case for large sites like newegg, buy.com, overstock etc. However, the greatest deal was the 20% (later dropped to 8%) cash back on ebay get it now purchases. I saved a lot of money with that and could never figure out how they could afford it. Plus, even if I loved the cash back thing, I would only visit bing to go to ebay through it - google was still my search engine, so they didn't gain anything by paying me. In all canceling the program seem
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Plus, even if I loved the cash back thing, I would only visit bing to go to ebay through it - google was still my search engine, so they didn't gain anything by paying me.
They took away from Google's referal bonus and received it themselves. So they did gain from it.
Now, they get to use those numbers to push their ad engine and pretend that there are tons of users using bing.
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What do you mean? You use google to go to ebay? I guess you don't like to use the address bar?
When I shop from newegg, ebay etc I go directly, I would assume it is the most common procedure. If I want to compare stores & prices I use specialized sites like retailerratings.com, pricegrabber etc.
Oh, and the ebay referal bonus could not possibly amount to anything close to the 8%-20% range that bing was giving.
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Most people I know don't write addresses anymore. They either have a bookmark or write the site's name in the search engine.
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I bet that they've done away with that old, humanoid overrated feature of being able to walk and chew gum at the same time too.
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I think MS was targeting the business user, those with expense accounts, or otherwise spending other peoples money. Buy an item on an expense account and pocket the difference. Like MS office, I think MS hoped that the work habits would transfer to home shopping. Of course people ten
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Re:I walk among you (Score:4, Funny)
Please resubmit with a few racial slurs or a Mormon explanation of the fate of black people.
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Actually, to pretend to use their search engine to buy things. The Bing advertisers would tell you - no matter how you arrived at the product - at checkout time that you could get Bing cashback if you put in the Bing code. So you had to go find the thing on Bing to get the code.
The basic dishonesty of this evolution didn't lend credibility to Bing with anybody involved.
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yes, and nobody would use it other than to use the cashback. Thus = watch bing marketshare drop quite quickly.
This is where that 800M+ spent on search advertising came from.
35 saddened users (Score:4, Funny)
From the look of the comments, Microsoft has at least 35 saddened users.
Snarky remark in TFS slamming MS, check.
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I used Bing cash back all the time... it's the only time I used Bing.
Bing cash back deals are huge on Fatwallet because sometimes they go up to 10%.
Back in the day, when bing was first released. They had up to 30% off certain Buy It Now items on eBay. I'd just go through and buy gift cards. $100 gift card for $70. I got my first Canon SLR at the same time. 13 months later I sold it for more than I actually paid for it (after cash back).
So there was a bit more than 35 users. People will use your crappy servi
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I second that. If you searched for "Silver" at one point, ebay would come up with silver. They had a 28% off buy it now and you could buy silver coins or buillion at market rates with low shipping and get 28% back up to $2000 from Bing. It was a nice deal while it lasted ;)
Los Links (Score:1)
Bing, otra vez.
Can't have Muslim Socialist w/o MS! (Score:3, Funny)
Is MS a secret muslim socialist, racist, america hater who blew up an oil well in the Gulf? Hey, I'm just asking questions!
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I guess it depends on your point of view. For me for the last decade reading the mainstream tech press has been all about Microsoft spin detection. Of course now that we have the Comes collection [groklaw.net] we know why: Microsoft is all over the influencing mindshare thing, influencing "analysts" like Rob Enderle and Maureen O'Gara by funding their "research" or feeding them pre-release gems to make them seem prescient, paying for "studies" by IDC, Gartner and the rest to buy their results, advertising in publicatio
Duh! (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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>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.
Now I have 100 different logins. OpenID doesnt seem to be going anywhere either. Err, victory?
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Somehow I still think of Microsoft as Bill Gates. I don't know exactly how true that is anymore. If it's pretty much true, I'm not surprised that they couldn't learn from their mistakes.
The Gates Foundation was on a kick for a couple of years where they promoted "small high schools." Small high schools have fewer than 500 students. They took existing schools and broke them into smaller pieces, on the assumption that the smaller communities would lead to better relationships and therefore better achievem
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http://img.skitch.com/20091006-nb6ashr9ge691gwqatrr9rgtg5.jpg [skitch.com]
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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.
The problem was the execution. If they wanted people to actually use it, then they needed to make the cashback completely random. Use it for a month and then perhaps you get a 12% cash back offer for a store of your choice. But that might NOT happen as well. So you'd have to keep using it until it did happen. As those familiar with the most effective methods of operant conditioning (psychology) will understand, this "random" nature (which mimics the "gambling" reward) is by far the most addictive.
So it woul
Picking on an autistic kid (Score:1, Funny)
I'm 35 years old, I've been fed up with Microsoft since about Windows XP SP2 although previously not much of a fan before that.
But at this point it's just like you guys are picking on the autistic kid.
We get it. Microsoft sucks. Give it back it's helmet.
Re:Picking on an autistic kid (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm 35 years old, I've been fed up with Microsoft since about Windows XP SP2 although previously not much of a fan before that.
But at this point it's just like you guys are picking on the autistic kid.
We get it. Microsoft sucks. Give it back it's helmet.
I don't know about the rest of the world, but I'll leave Microsoft alone when it starts leaving me alone.
Microsoft may be autistic, but that's not why we pick on it. We pick on it because it's also crazy and occasionally a little scary. But mostly we pick on it because we all know it's the crazy, scary autistic kid, but nobody else seems to see the problem in that.
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meh, they canceled it a long time ago (Score:1, Insightful)
I signed up when I was going to buy a big LCD TV.
Got all the confirmation emails, or so I thought.
Signed onto Bing, "searched", bought the TV, never got the refund. Poked the seller to no avail. No way to poke Microsoft.
It was only about a $75 rebate. Still got a great price with free shipping, but I could have found that on Google too.
Damn. (Score:1)
I'm Sad (Score:5, Funny)
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A bit of a 'meet too' reply, but I've also had a similar amount from them.
Can't say I'm surprised the program is ending, though I am disappointed. I'm still not sure how much Microsoft actually shelled out other than in admin costs, I suspect the promotions themselves may have been paid for by retaillers.
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Re:I'm Sad (Score:5, Insightful)
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Cliche (Score:4, Funny)
bye bing (Score:1)
It's a shame there have not been any ebay bing's greater than 8% in a while or I would use them more....
I never really understood their motivation behind cash-back, especially with many sites having a discounted price for non-bing users (scam, I know) but I did appreciate the ebay buy it now discounts....
MS has now removed the only motivation to use their service in my eyes.
Microsoft doesn't get advertizing (Score:5, Insightful)
Almost all their recent TV ads are as lame as hell. I'm watching and thinking, "What the hell are they talking about? Is this Random Night?". Then they mention the name of the product, such as Bing or Windows 7.
In one ad, there's a guy sitting in a college class, then suddenly he's naked, then he's a caveman at a business meeting, then a naked caveman. WTF city. I seriously expected them to say, "Windows 7 and Bing will together help you locate better LSD".
Please go back to Gates and Seinfeld wiggling their asses together. At least I know which end I'm looking at.
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I haven't seen the ad you speak of (serious WTF city, if that's true), but I have seen a theme of several ads. This:
Almost all their recent TV ads are as lame as hell.
Does not hold true.
The ones I'm thinking of are the ones where they're basically 'hyping' Windows 7: "get things done faster" or some such tagline. They're basically selling the new 'Run' bar/dialog which is, IMO, the single best feature of W7. It really does as advertised, and the ads are good (largly because they're also educational to W7 users).
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I do not know this feature of which you speak, unless you are referring to something that was also in Vista.
It was a scam (Score:5, Interesting)
I and several other people I know used bing a lot for about a week in late 2008. At the time, Microsoft was literally offering 25-35% off any buy-it-now item on ebay (I'm pretty sure from their own pocket, no way they were making 25% off those purchases).
I bought a new car stereo, camera lens, laptop, and several gifts. I saved over 500 dollars. Then, like a month later, I saw a news release where Microsoft showed off that the number of Bing users had doubled or something over the holiday period. They probably used this to gain traction in advertising and increase their collaboration with companies like Apple.
They literally paid people to use bing over a month-long period to pad some statistics! I wonder if it was worth the 500 dollars they handed me.
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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
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I look at Bing.com -- the main page -- almost every day. Once. The background images they put up are at worst good, usually excellent, and at times breath-taking. (The tool-tip factoids are dumb, though.)
Then I go to Google to actually get work done.
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Bing! Should just buy Flooz... (Score:2, Funny)
...after all that has become the defacto currency on the Internet... right? right?
Yeah, but the cashback was often your own money (Score:4, Informative)
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Only with ebay. When I bought my netbook, it was the same price between newegg and TigerDirect (the cashback store). Saved me $50.
Club Bing still around (Score:2)
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Nice while it lasted, but not surprising... (Score:2)
You had to imagine this was going to happen, everyone I knew was using Bing for the sole purpose of getting cashback. I'd search for something on Bing (The old standby was 'cheap ps3') and then follow the link to eBay and get xx% cashback on my BiN purchases. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.
I don't know what that bob8766 guy way up above is talking about [slashdot.org], I'm pretty sure he's either making that crap up or is just ignorant. Because I never saw anything like that from retailers (Also, that sounds like
What is Bing again? (Score:1)
Cashback + ebay was serious savings (Score:2)
Of Course They Did (Score:2)
Jump-starting the use of your service through a glorified referral program is a solid idea, but eventually, you want to be something more than that, particularly when it comes to search.
Just as unsustainable as Google cash back (Score:3, Informative)
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 $320 dual-core, wide-screen laptops courtesy of Bing.com, too. *sniff*
I'm glad (Score:2)
It seemed like 2/3 of the posts on bargain hunting sites were focused around using this to buy stuff, and it made shopping online a real chore to make sure it went through and to wait to get the money back later. There was always an immense guilt if you didn't use it and I spent too much time crunching numbers.
Bob and Bing have now retired. (Score:2)
In the UK... (Score:1)
...we have many cashback sites that give you a cut of the money from you clicking their affiliate links, usually a percentage of the amount you spend. There are many of them so it's clearly a viable business model, and as a customer it's brilliant. I've got the impression that Bing worked differently and I've got the impression that in the US you don't have cashback sites like we do, am I correct?
Would NOW be a good time to remind people... (Score:2)
...that in the Chinese, "bing" means poison?
Remember the iwon.com ads? (Score:2)
When was it? They used to advertise heavily on TV. It positioned itself as a search service, and the pitch was that every time you used it for a search, you were automatically getting entered for free into a sweepstakes. The obnoxious ad showed a "plain-folks" lady, presumably at work, asking sotto voce "If I use it at work and I win, does my boss get the money?" and the announcer saying enthusiastically "No, you get the money," and the lady replying "Good to know."
Of course I tried it, and the free sweepst
Simply put - BCB was more money in my pocket... (Score:2)
By using a combination of key words (a bunch from http://www.slickdeals.net/ [slickdeals.net]) on bing.com (especially during the holiday season), I was able to save between 5% to 30% on a bunch of items. I knew M$ was trying to buy results and did not care - $1500 cash back in addition to more from rebates and sometimes coupons which worked with cash back is more money in my pocket....
As for the person who says it costs more to buy thru bing - I don't think so - there are some items which go on sale at specific merchant
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Nobody uses Bing but tons of us use Cashback. I use it for nearly every single thing I buy online if I can. It's not always a lot, like Newegg is usually only 2% but it's better than nothing. Ebay usually gives good Cashback on Buy It Now stuff and I have used that to save lots (like 30% off the CPU I'm using right now). I have saved hundreds of dollars since they started the Cashback thing.
Sad to see it go. It is one of the primary discounts us bargain hunters use.
Re:And no one cared (Score:5, Funny)
I've actually seen a (one) user with Bing as their home page. Not sure what would cause that to happen.
your search engine of choice?
google. check
yahoo. check
dogpile. really?
bing. what?
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I think I saw that on television! It was something like CSI, and I thought "that's the least realistic thing they've ever shown..."
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my blackberry from verizon search suddenly changed to bing with no way to undo it. so i undid my blackberry.
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The thing is most people end up typing Google's URL in or serac
Re:And no one cared (Score:4, Informative)
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I've actually seen a (one) user with Bing as their home page. Not sure what would cause that to happen.
I use it intermittently for privacy concerns about google's data collection habits. Big deal.
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i did honestly try to switch to bing when it came out. i'm a fan of breaking up any monopoly by voting with my dollar and opinion.
but, yeah, the bing results were just too wacky. i'm sure there was a way to search that would probably produce the results i wanted, but it seems like google always thought how i did, when i would go looking for things. either that, or after all this time, i am trained to search on google to get the results i want.
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on the topic at hand, ms is not a monopoly. i can't think of any situation where i could call the company as a whole, or divisions of it, "corrupt."