Microsoft Live cash back – Aftermath analysis

The story of live cashback that was launched in it’s new version in Q3 of 08, was actually a nice comparison shopping engine tool (CSE) that called Jellyfish.

Microsoft has identified This CSE (comparison shopping engine), and acquired it on Oct 07. it took MS almost a year to take the jellyfish tool and bring it to it’s full scale ability.

JellyFish, had become “Live Cashback” and was integrated in MS live search.

the results weren’t staggering to say in understatement, but in Q3 of 08 there was a major turnover.

Q4 was the turning point, where live cashback had become one of the major player in the CSE filed (along with Shopping.com, Shopzila, Nextag, Google Base).

taking leverage of the joint Live cashback and eBay coupon system, live cashback has grown to approximate 12% share of the whole CSE market.

the eBay-cashback program was designed to help fight the downturn of sales in eBay and general. ChannelAdvisor also had announced that it would provide support to working with eBay the holidays MS live.com cashback.

All hope were very high.. what are the results.. certainly not unanimous.

on the one hand consumers were offered to that they can save up to 30% with this program promotion, but the trouble and hassle of the complexity of the program was taking it’s toll: Many merchant and power sellers were complaining most of their client couldn’t get the coupon activated, or couldn’t get into the right page were the program is being seen and client see that account is eligible for promotion discount. lots of headache and customer service issues, made major sellers to quite the program before it even started.

conclusion: it takes a great effort to bring good program, and greater effort to make it easy and seamless to use.

Simplicity is the answer.