Here’s how it works
- Got Live.com and search “PS3 80gb” — within the results returned you’ll see an eBay ad with the gold coin cashback icon
and “Live Search cashback.” - Click the eBay ad to go to Ebay, search “190271173117” or the ID you want and make your purchase.
- After completing the payment with PayPal, you’ll receive a message saying you’re eligible for “instant cashback.” Yippee!
- The cashback amount is automatically deposited into your Paypal account and posted to your cashback account.
Note: “Instant Cashback” whereby the cashback gets instantly deposited into your Paypal account upon purchase only applies to PowerSellers, from what I’m aware of. Act quick and get your xmas presents early.. not sure how long this will last.
Details – http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2008/12/01/you-asked-for-it-instant-cashback.aspx
Many may ask how Microsoft is able to do this as it appears they are throwing out cash. But let’s look at it this way. They probably formed some type of partnership with Ebay (owns Paypal). If you’ve sold on Ebay, you’ll know that they’ll take about 10% per transaction. Where’s the other 20% coming from? They’ll probably write it off as advertising/marketing to push their live.com (a search engine that I don’t know anyone uses). Let’s say their budget to market live.com is 500 million. Since they don’t have an expiration date on the 30% deal and since cashback is capped at about $2,000 per customer and most people probably will only utilize 25% of that $2,000 ($500), that’s a million people that are visiting live.com + ebay.com multiple times + word of mouth. They can easily end the promotion when they’ve given out 500 million. Additional costs to marketing this promotion is $0 (post on their msn.com site). So in the end, they are not merely throwing cash out the window.
This promotion becomes a failure when the following happens:
- Each user maximizes his/her promotion eligibility at $2,400 by purchasing $800 items 12x.
- Ebay prices become inflated to the point that prices are not attractive even after the 30% off.
- System gets abused by having buyers resell the item (recycle).
UPDATE:
12/2/2008 – 2:41PM – now 25%
12/2/2008 – 7:00PM – now 20% (I’m pretty sure it will bump up to 30% one last time before XMAS. Hang in there..)
12/2/2008 – 7:00PM – search “wii fit” at live.com. you’ll get a 25% off link
12/3/2007 – “wii fit” no longer shows 25%. search “phone”
12/12/2008 – “Overstock Electronics” brings up 20% off
