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Microsoft Cancels Bing Cashback Program

Posted by timothy on from the it-couldn't-last dept.

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."

17 of 124 comments (clear)

  1. Bing by freefrag · · Score: 5, Interesting

    They had to pay people to use their search engine?

    1. Re:Bing by bob8766 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I didn't even see how it was getting paid to use Bing. I would search on Bing for a deal and find ones where I would have to wait for cash back.
      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.

    2. Re:Bing by thegarbz · · Score: 4, 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.

    3. Re:Bing by rtb61 · · Score: 3, 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.

      --
      Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
  2. 35 saddened users by socsoc · · Score: 3, Funny

    From the look of the comments, Microsoft has at least 35 saddened users.

    Snarky remark in TFS slamming MS, check.

  3. Duh! by Jah-Wren+Ryel · · 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.

    --
    When information is power, privacy is freedom.
  4. Can't have Muslim Socialist w/o MS! by emeade · · 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!

  5. I'm Sad by LearnToSpell · · Score: 4, Funny

    They've given me just under a thousand bucks over the last year and a bit, including buying a Wii and an N900 (20% off each). It was easy to use, I didn't have any problems, and it's a shame they won't send me money to complete my shopping trips anymore, after I found what I needed with Google.

    --
    Haida Manga
    1. Re:I'm Sad by Etherized · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Indeed. This program is solely responsible for me ever using ebay. They say it's discontinued due to poor adoption, or some such thing; I think adoption was quite rapid amongst people looking to save money and get the absolute best prices possible. The problem is, as an advertiser, those are the people you're least interested in.

  6. Cliche by hilather · · Score: 4, Funny

    Microsoft couldn't pay me to use bing. Literally.

  7. Re:And no one cared by v1 · · Score: 4, 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?

    --
    I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
  8. Microsoft doesn't get advertizing by Tablizer · · Score: 4, 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.
           

    --
    Table-ized A.I.
  9. It was a scam by rm999 · · 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.

  10. Re:I walk among you by Ethanol-fueled · · Score: 4, Funny

    4/10. You lose 2 point for delusions of grandeur(God complex), 1 point for excessive length(does every line have to be double-spaced?), and 3 points for lack of offensiveness.

    Please resubmit with a few racial slurs or a Mormon explanation of the fate of black people.

  11. Yeah, but the cashback was often your own money by aklinux · · Score: 4, Informative

    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

  12. Re:Picking on an autistic kid by grcumb · · Score: 3, 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.

    --
    Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
  13. Re:And no one cared by Kakari · · Score: 4, Informative

    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 :) !