The Cashback program instituted by Microsoft during a time when their LiveSearch was circling the drain worked to bring shoppers back to the network, now that it has served its purpose, Bing is discontinuing the program next month.
According to the Bing Community blog:
“…we will be retiring the Bing cashback feature, which means that the last day you can earn cashback will be July 30, 2010.
Why are we doing this? When we originally began to offer the cashback feature, it was designed to help advertisers reach you with compelling offers, and to provide a new type of shopping experience that would change user behavior and attract a bunch of new users to Bing.
In lots of ways, this was a great feature – we had over a thousand merchant partners delivering great offers to customers and seeing great ROI on their campaigns, and we were taking some of the advertising revenue and giving it back to customers. But after a couple of years of trying, we did not see the broad adoption that we had hoped for.
So we are taking all the learning from the effort and putting it into some new programs for you and our advertisers designed to provide amazing shopping experiences for consumers and great opportunities for advertisers.”
The blog goes on to promise that rewards can still be redeemed for a year.
The rewards program was actually too successful at one point, when Bing ran an aggressive TV campaign that promised double rewards. they ended up having to pull the plug on the campaign four days early due to overwhelming stampedes of people eager to save.
Bing claims they have big plans for the future that will reach more of their users and benefit shoppers. According to eWeek, Microsoft VP Yusuf Mehdi weighed in:
More Bing Shopping products and deals are on the way, according to Mehdi, who said:
“Shopping remains one of the most important tasks people engage in while using search, and we remain committed to delivering great shopping experiences for you that help you make better shopping decisions, get great deals, and save time and money along the way.
“For merchants and advertisers, we have some ideas for making it easy to get a broader array of products and offers into Bing, and we’ll share some details on this later this summer.”
Tags: Bing cashback, double rewards