Microsoft Bing Cashback and how it will benefit (your wallet).

Microsoft has been trying desperately to cut into Google's piece of the search engine pie. They overhauled their previous Live Search engine, and are now calling it Bing. As a Google junkie, I find the Bing search to be not even close to the quality of search that Google gives, but they do have one added perk.

They are paying people to use their search engine, and buy stuff with several different vendors.

Here's how it works..

You go to bing.com/cashback and sign up for an account. You link the account to your paypal account, or your bank account. I chose to let them paypal me the money. Every purchase that you make using the website will give you a certain percentage of "cashback", which is money deposited into your account 90 days after the transaction is over.

They make you wait 90 days to stop people from returning items, then collecting the cash.

Over the Holidays the cashback was 15% or more in many stores. I bought a Nintendo Wii for 15% cashback, and saved quite a bit over normal store prices.

Forums such as slickdeals.net usually post more secret deals. If you do a search using specific keywords on bing, an ad will come up for a certain store. If you click the ad, you will get even more cashback. Enter CASHBACKR..

Cashbackr is a pretty good website. They track what the percentage is right to the last second, and what the trends are. eBay is a very large Bing Cashback sponsor, and there was a a time near christmas where you could get 20% cashback on ANY item that you used "Buy it Now" with on eBay.

This could add up to some serious bucks. Cashbackr does a great job of tracking special keywords that you need to search on bing to get the highest amount of cashback.

Right now as I type this, the highest cashback on ebay is 8%, and the top keyword is "silver roll". This will change at any moment. Cashbackr can even email you when the cashback goes over a certain percentage, so you can start shopping like mad.

My experience with Bing cashback has been a pretty good one. I netted about 150 dollars this past holiday season. I even used it on buying some expensive wheel bearings for my car on eBay, and got 15 percent back.

My only gripe is that it takes 90 days to get the cash back, but I understand why they do this. If you just think of it as a mail in rebate, then you will feel better about it also.

Cheers,
Justin