Microsoft dumps Bing cashback

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Microsoft has abandoned its Bing cashback feature, which provided shoppers with an area to browse various e-commerce offers.

The move will not affect deal hunters in the UK, where the Bing shopping experience is delivered through Microsoft-owned Ciao, as the cashback service is only supported in the US.

However, those wanting to take advantage of the deals only have until 30 July to get on board.

Microsoft confirmed customers would have a year to redeem any cashback earned and it would provide 12 months of customer support for users.

"After a couple of years of trying, we did not see the broad adoption that we had hoped for," Yusuf Mehdi, Bing's senior vice president for its online audience business group, said in a blog post.

"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."

Mehdi explained Bing would be taking its experience with the soon-to-be-defunct feature and putting it into new projects.

"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," Mehdi added.

Tom Brewster

Tom Brewster is currently an associate editor at Forbes and an award-winning journalist who covers cyber security, surveillance, and privacy. Starting his career at ITPro as a staff writer and working up to a senior staff writer role, Tom has been covering the tech industry for more than ten years and is considered one of the leading journalists in his specialism.

He is a proud alum of the University of Sheffield where he secured an undergraduate degree in English Literature before undertaking a certification from General Assembly in web development.