Bing Cashback

» see bing.com/cashback as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

bing cashback paid users a percentage back when they searched through microsoft's engine, clicked through to a participating merchant, and completed a purchase. the percentage came out of microsoft's slice of the ad revenue the merchant was already paying for the placement. on the user side it looked like discount shopping. on the microsoft side it looked like buying search share at a unit cost.

the tech came from a 2007 acquisition. microsoft bought jellyfish.com out of middleton wisconsin, a small reverse-auction shopping site founded the year before by brian wiegand and mark mcguire, for roughly fifty million dollars. the jellyfish.com brand kept running until february 2009 when it was folded into the cashback infrastructure. on 22 may 2008 microsoft launched live search cashback. on 1 june 2009 the broader live search rebrand made it bing cashback. fourteen months after that, the program was over.

microsoft posted the farewell on the bing search blog on 4 june 2010. the closure rationale was direct: after a couple of years of trying, we did not see the broad adoption that we had hoped for. users had until 9pm pst on 30 july 2010 to earn cashback, and twelve months to redeem any pending balance.

i missed bing cashback completely. it was united states retail only, tied to retailers who would not ship to turkey or who priced their tr fulfillment through entirely different channels. ttnet adsl in 2008-2010 could load bing fine but the cashback flow would have died at the shipping address picker. for me, bing of that era meant the satellite-image background and the occasional novelty search comparison against google.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it actually paid out ~

the participating merchant list crossed a thousand at peak. ebay, sears, hp, dell, barnes and noble, walmart, jr.com. the rebate percentages varied: some merchants offered two or three percent, some pushed eight or ten on promotional categories. shoppers who knew the program well could stack the cashback with merchant promo codes for a stacked discount that briefly looked too good.

that briefly-too-good window was part of the wind-down. coupon and deal-hunter communities had figured out how to game the highest-rate merchants by funneling pre-existing purchase intent through the cashback redirect. microsoft was paying out search-share-acquisition dollars to users who would have bought from those merchants regardless. the program was leaking value in the exact way it was designed not to.

~ what really happened ~

microsoft gave a year of redemption support after the 30 july 2010 earn cutoff. users could continue to cash out accumulated rebates through july 2011. customer support stayed on for the transition. the bing brand kept building toward the yahoo search integration deal and the windows phone push, leaving the cashback experiment as a closed line item.

~ what remains ~

the rebate-via-search concept did not die with bing cashback. ebates (later rakuten) had been doing browser-extension cashback since 1999 and outlasted the microsoft attempt by more than a decade. honey followed. the bing brand itself revived a smaller bing rebates pilot in the early 2020s on shopping searches, more cautious than the 2008 swing for the fences. the jellyfish.com acquisition was the part that quietly worked, even if the product around it did not.

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