Slashdot Mirror
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."
Deal with MS, get screwed.
Nothing to see here, move on....
The right one is "Will people finding out cost more than lawsuits if it isn't legal". If the answer is yes, don't do it, if no then go on ahead.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Find out what sites go higher and what sites go lower in quoted prices. Fake a cookie to maximize savings or delete it altogether if it gets you a uniformly higher price.
That's the behavior I'd expect from /. . None of this Newsweek / Dateline NBC alarmist "They're using COMPUTER MACHINES to scam us!!!" Get on it, people.
I read the article; the author works for Bountii which also directs users to places to shop for things. What the article describes is one retailer specifically inflating prices of things when a user comes from Bing. That same retailer could just as easily do the same for links from the author's own site, Bountii. They even go as far to state "At Bountii, we do our best to make sure we always show the lowest available price at a store." It just seems a bit disingenuous to me I guess.
So 'ButterflyPhoto.com' is slime; thanks, got it.
Sounds like the hidden credit card tax. Everything you buy is a few cents extra to cover credit card costs. Then you get "rewards" for using your card. Meanwhile everyone else gets 'gypped' 2 cents. Yes, it is different, but still similar.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This has nothing to do with Microsoft. From the article: Butterfly Photo set a three month cookie on my computer to indicate that I came from Bing.
So, a disreputable web site is setting a cookie when you click on a sales link. How is this Microsoft's fault again? What does this have to do with Bing?
A/V and photography stores are notorious for ripping off customers, both in-store and on-line. Surprise surprise, you can find these disreputable sites using search engines. Trying to blame this on Bing is like trying to blame your phone book for recommending a sketchy car mechanic.
...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.
Did anyone else notice the story submitter's alias links to a sex toy shopping site?
My top suggestions are:
Badda-BING
and
Kerr-Ching
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
You went to all that trouble to transcribe the PDF without reading the summaries noting that it had to do something else entirely? The takedown letter was for explaining a mechanism to post fake transactions to Bing Cashback, which could reasonably be described as telling people how to exploit Bing for money.
This is completely separate from telling people that merchants charge Bing customers more.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I just had occasion to visit a Microsoft developer's website earlier today. Very rare event, believe me.
After browsing, I always clear out my cookies.
I went nowhere near the Bing "decision engine." But lo and behold, there was a cookie for "bing.com" in my cookie cache before I cleared it.
So, is Microsoft inflating Bing's numbers? Visit any Microsoft site, and you get a Bing cookie counted as a search on Bing? What gives?
Same here, I get the lower price with or without cookies. Seeing as the article was written by a Bing competitor it's a way for them to get exposure.
* Step 1: Write article saying M$ is evil /.
* Step 2: Submit story to
* Step 3: Profit!
Doesn't matter if it's true or not
I never heard of that. Besides, why would Amazon need to rely on a browser's cookie to identify returning customers when Amazon requires customers to have an account with them and be logged in before purchases are made?
Because if simply logging in or out changed the prices, you'd know right away something was amiss. If it was cookie-driven, then it would not rely on you having to login and Amazon could always show you the inflated price regardless of your login status.
I'm sorry, but your typo made me laugh.
The CB App. What's your 20?
That wasn't exactly it, Amazon was testing different price points for items and set a cookie to make sure once your price point was set it remained. However some people noticed if they cleared their cookies they would get a lower price sometimes. The people who got a higher price didn't really have much to say about it. In the end everyone got charged the lowest price even if they thought they were paying the higher price.
Could MS be liable in a class action lawsuit if it explicitly offered or otherwise encouraged this practice? This story could have teeth.
What makes you think that MS encourages a practice that makes prices LESS appealing using its search engine?
I'm more inclined to believe the official statement that it was a mistake (i.e. item went on sale at some point but got updated wrong in the Bing index).
Maybe the shop was truly giving an higher price but that's a totally absurd practice. I would have understood if they had given a price that with the 2% cashback was the same than without (the price appears the same to the costumer and the shop cashes more in), but 50 bucks more?! Also, change a price under 699$ to go above the psychological 700$ level?
It is slightly more userfriendlier(ish) than Google.
How is that even possible? Google is a plain white web page with a text box and a logo.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
The US Department of Justice can't even successfully hit them with an antitrust suit. Microsoft settled, and then laughed off the settlement. Or else we'd have those APIs at the very least, wouldn't we?
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
After the search is where it gets better. The results pages on Bing are way better, and have even caused a stir at Google.
In what way does it get better? I tried Bing a few times, and its results on many test queries were roughly equal to Google's. On some queries, Google was definitely better than Bing. In no case was Bing better than Google. I just compared Bing & Google again with two simple searches to see if there was any substance to your claim, and there was not. Google still has the edge.
The first search was: tilt-integral-derivative. The two engines gave quite similar results for such a clear unambiguous and uncommon term. This implies they are spidering with similar coverage.
The second search was: colonel shakespeare -william. Google's results were clearly more relevant. This implies that Bing's ranking algorithm is still not as good as Google's. Try it with other searches where the search terms are quite common and one occurs overwhelmingly in an unwanted context. Bing borks them.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
And here's the offending message (it doesn't even reveal much):
I’ve never bought anything using Bing Cashback, but the balance of my account is $2080.06. Apparently, I placed two $1 orders on January 24th of this year, and spent another $104,000 on October 24th. Let’s see how these transactions might have “accidentally” got credited to my account.
First, we need to try to figure out how transactions get into Bing Cashback. Microsoft posted some documentation here. The explanation of how a merchant reports transactions to Bing starts on page 20. Merchants have a few options for reporting, but Bing suggests using a tracking pixel. Basically, the merchant adds a tracking pixel to their order confirmation page, which will report the the transaction details back to Bing. The request for the tracking pixel looks something like this:
https://ssl.search.live.com/cashback/pixel/index?
jftid=0&jfoid=<orderid>&jfmid=<merchantid>
&m[0]=<itemid>&p[0]=<price>&q[0]=<quantity>
This implementation, while easy for the merchant, has an obvious flaw. Anyone can simulate the tracking pixel requests, and post fake transactions to Bing. I’m not going to explain exactly how to generate the fake requests so that they actually post, but it’s not complicated. Bing doesn’t seem to be able to detect these fake transactions, at least not right away. The six cents I earned in January have “cleared,” and I’m guessing the remaining $2080 will clear on schedule, unless there is some manual intervention.
Even if Bing detects these fake transactions at some point in the future, the current implementation might have another interesting side effect. I haven’t done enough work to say it with confidence, but a malicious user might be able to block another user’s legitimate purchases from being reported correctly by Bing (I only tried this once, but it seemed to work). Posting a transaction to Bing requires sending them an order ID in the request. Bing performs a reasonable sanity check on the order ID, and will not post a transaction that repeats a previously reported order ID. When a store uses predictable order ID’s (e.g. sequential), a malicious user can “use up” all the future order ID’s, and cause legitimate transactions to be ignored. Reporting would be effectively down for days, causing a customer service nightmare for both Bing and the merchant.
Based on what I’ve found, I wouldn’t implement Bing Cashback if I were a merchant. And, as an end user and bargain hunter, it does not seem smart to rely on Bing Cashback for savings. In our next blog post, I’ll demonstrate some other subtle but important reasons to avoid using Bing Cashback.
After the search is where it gets better.
Not really. After re-branding Live Search as "Bing", to leave the baggage associated with the old name, they also struck a deal so that Bing is a front-end for Wolfram Alpha plus whatever Live Search might have had. So to get those results unmodified, you don't have to go through M$ filter, you can go straight to Wolfram Alpha skipping the middle man. Not difficult.
There are even meta-search engines that can cross-search both Google and Wolfram Alpha for you. For Firefox there is the Goofram add-on which lets you search both at the same time. If you're on Opera, Safari or Chromium, there are also search customization options there, too.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
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.
Not surprised, camera shops are one of those things that are commonly operated by scammers. Camera scammers tend to give you a low price for the camera, but try to make you pay extra for the battery that was already included. Sometimes they sell units with no domestic warranty (gray market), and sometimes they won't sell you the camera unless you buy extra warranties or extra accessories. If you refuse to buy the things, they might just not sell it to you. Or just take your money and run.
Check this shop's ratings at resellerratings.com: http://www.resellerratings.com/store/ButterFly_Photo