14 DAY TRIAL // At over a year since debuting an initiative designed to steal online shoppers away from rival operating systems by offering them cashback incentives, Microsoft is touting almost double the volume of offers it had initially. When it went live in May 2008, Live Search Cashback featured over 10 million offers. In over a year that number has grown to more than 17 million. But at this point in time Live Search Cashback is no more, having evolved as Bing Cashback.
“Bing cashback is easy as 1, 2, 3: Search, Shop and Save,” said Raju Malhotra, director of product management, Bing. “Within Bing’s product search results or sponsored listings, click on any product or ad with the Bing cashback gleam, shown here, purchase the product through the merchant’s site, and get cashback. In most cases, you will have to wait 60 days to get your cashback, but after that period, you can get your cashback via PayPal, direct deposit to your bank account or via check mailed to you.”
Malhotra explained that the new products that online shoppers could buy via Bing had increased because of the constant addition of participants in the program. The increase of merchants interested in Bing Cashback is by no means surprising. In fact, Microsoft indicated that the advertiser ROI was sufficient explanation for the program's increasing popularity among online shops. Malhotra offered eBay as an example, revealing that the ecommerce website registered “a 10x increase in clicks to its site, a 7x increase in sales and 4x return when compared to its previous year’s performance with us.”
Microsoft's claims of success for Bing Cashback are supported by statistics. “According to data from comScore, our numbers of absolute shopping queries in the past year are up by 57 percent in the U.S. In the overall search space, shopping queries were up only 42 percent, meaning we outperformed the U.S. market on shopping query growth. From a marketshare perspective in shopping queries, we’ve also grown year-over-year from 17.6 percent marketshare in April 08 to 19.4 percent at the end of April 2009,” Malhotra added.