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Bing Cashback Can Cost You Money
paltemalte writes "Microsoft and various retailers have teamed up to bring you cashback on purchases made via Bing's price comparison feature. There is a little snag, though — it seems that when you have a Bing cookie living in your browser, some retailers will quote you a higher price than if you come with no Bing cookie in your system."
...are the notorious 'employee discount codes' that vendors such as Dell and other have employed. A few years back I was looking to buy a new LCD and had a Dell in mind when I remembered my company had a discount code. So I dug it up, and used the instructions provided to logon to the 'discount' site (the mechanics of doing so may be different today.) To my surprise, I found that the 'discounted' price of the monitor was several hundred dollars more than just the plain ol' Dell site. WTF? How do you advertise a code and process as a discount, and then the merchandise therein is actually priced higher than your regular price from your main site? I'm glad I double checked before hitting the purchase button.
No surprise ... price variations based on cookies ... is old news. I remember reading about how cookies resident on the user's machine can cause different quoted prices to appear years ago ... probably five years ago at least. I was able to test it at the time using two browsers with different cookie loads. It's definitely happening. Come to think of it, I'm pretty sure it was a /. story years ago that first mentioned it.
MSDN's search is powered by bing. So... no surprise?
I'm no user of Bing, but it was pretty obvious reading the article that this guy has an axe to grind against Bing. First he supposedly finds a security flaw that enables you to game the system, uses that security flaw personally and posts for others how to do it on his site and now he's posting about this.
And to top it off, he's a competitor. Pretty slimy.
I'm a big tall mofo.