Microsoft has been rather shy of detailing the success of Live Search Cashback, a service offering shoppers cashback incentives (bet you didn’t see that coming) for the products they purchase online, provided that they use Live Search to search and find and subsequently buy items from vendors participating in the program. Apparently Live Search Cashback catalyzes over 10,000 purchases per day. That’s over 300,000 purchases per month, 3,600,000 purchases per year. Cashback accounts for more than 5 million views per day – you do the math to figure out what that means per month or per year.
But I’m sure of a thing. Sale numbers like these are not enough for Microsoft to catch up with Google. Not by a long shot. Cashback was introduced in May 2008, an evolution of Jellyfish, a search engine based on the same concept of offering financial rewards to users shopping online.
Microsoft says: If there is one product that is in the heart of Microsoft strategy to win in the Internet search business, it would be the Microsoft Product Search ( http://search.live.com/cashback).
One of the main principles of Product Search is the concept of Cashback. Cashback is changing the way online shopping works – it is the future of online shopping: users search for a product, buy it, receive CashBack from Microsoft subsidized by the merchants, creating a win-win cycle where merchants are encouraged to increase the CashBack to attract more users, benefiting both parties. We have launched version 1.0 of CashBack and we get more than 5,000,000 views a day and 10,000 purchases every day – and we’re exponentially growing!
The search gap Microsoft needs to close in to get closer to Google is immense. And 300,000 Live Search Cashback purchases per month are not going to help close it. From ComScore:
In March 2009, Americans conducted 14.3 billion core searches, a 9-percent gain versus February.
March 2009 U.S. Core Search Rankings
Google Sites led the U.S. core search market in March with 63.7 percent of the searches conducted, followed by Yahoo! Sites (20.5 percent), Microsoft Sites (8.3 percent), Ask Network (3.8 percent) and AOL LLC (3.7 percent).
Americans conducted 14.3 billion searches at the core search engines, up 9 percent from February. Google Sites accounted for 9.1 billion core searches, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 2.9 billion and Microsoft Sites with 1.2 billion.
Those are numbers you can believe in. Good to see this program finally catching on. I have used it a few times and it is a nice feeling to see that mo9ney added to my PayPal account. Question is how will Live Cash Back be rebranded this June – Bing Cash Back, Kumo Cash Back?
That doesn’t sound as good.
If my money is on anything that it’s on the rebranding itself. Microsoft just doesn’t seem to make Live Search work at the scale it would want.