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Our Blogs The BeerFiles Microsoft says you search, we pay
Our Blogs The BeerFiles Microsoft says you search, we pay | Microsoft says you search, we pay |
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| by Stan Beer | |
| Thursday, 22 May 2008 | |
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At first glance, the service does provide some obvious benefits for both consumers and retailers. On the consumer side, the service does enable shoppers to search for a specific product and get a range of prices from different retailers, enabling them to buy from the lowest priced supplier (or check to see if they can get even cheaper somewhere else such as Amazon). There are plenty of products that you will not see at a reasonable price, such as the iPhone, or at all, such as a Rolex watch, but surprisingly you can get a MacBook for US$1032, which is cheaper than the online Apple store where it starts at US$1099. For retailers, the service allows them to advertise without paying a cent unless they sell something. If they do make a sale, they pay for the ad by giving a cash back percentage of the purchase price (somewhere between 2% and 30%) to Microsoft which then passes that full amount on to the consumer through either a PayPal or bank account deposit. In effect the cashback amount means little to consumers because they are shown the bottom line cost of the product including the cashback when they make their purchase. There is a downside for retailers, however. Being on the Microsoft Live Search Cashback site exposes your store to a direct price comparison with competitors, so unless you have the lowest priced product on the block, the chances are you won't make any sales for that product. |
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