Another Look At Live Search CashbackAnother Look At Live Search Cashback

In technology news, there's plenty of first-day analysis but not so much follow-up. Soon after Microsoft announced Live Search Cashback there was plenty of coverage, including my own. After a couple of months of using the service, I think it's already losing its gloss.The most annoying retreat that Microsoft has made on the service is to remove the shipping charge calculation. When Live Search Cashback made its debut, you could enter your ZIP code and it would calculate the final price, including shipping. This was a big plus over competitors like Google Shopping, and a real time saver. It's frustrating to go halfway through the checkout process for a small item, only to find the merchant wants to gouge you $10 for slow-boat shipping.

No doubt it was difficult to track all the shipping offers that different vendors provide, and to compare something like free 2-day shipping with free ground or parcel post shipping. Even given those flaws, I would have liked to have seen that feature stay. As a consolation prize, Cashback now indicates whether the merchant offers free shipping. That's better than nothing, I guess.

The Cashback pages are pretty clear that you don't have the ability to request rebates be paid out until at least 60 days after the purchase. That makes sense; the merchant needs some leeway to reverse the rebate in case there is a problem shipping a product or you return some of the order. What doesn't make sense is that after requesting your rebate, you have to wait up to an additional 15 days for the payment to actually occur. In an age of instant electronic transfers, there's no excuse for taking that long.

Given the long gestation period of the rebates, it would be convenient to sort the results in some other order than the lowest price including rebate. When I have purchased through Cashback, I tend to look for the lowest prerebate price and treat the rebate as something that will be nice to have in 75 days when it finally arrives. But there's no way to find that price except to scan all the pages manually.

Hey, Microsoft, the rebates are nice, but don't get lazy. Let people know that the 60-day waiting period is really 75 days. But that's not my biggest complaint; Live Search Cashback should be a great product search engine first and foremost. Start looking for features to add, and stop taking out features.