Check it out now… http://search.live.com/cashback
Lots of coverage out there; I saw Todd report it first.
I’ll post some more tomorrow when I can play with it a bit more. Initially, it looks like Live Search Cashback is basically eBates on steroids. They’ve got a number of merchants signed up, and they’re doing both comparison shopping as well as splitting the commission on sale with the purchaser, thus giving a good reason to do comparison shopping @ Live Search. However, unlike Amazon’s Pro Merchant program, which I highly recommend, the customer goes directly to the shopping store. Amazon actually facilitates the transaction, thus the merchant in question doesn’t actually see the customer’s billing information and the merchant must abide by Amazon’s A-Z guarantee, esp. on returns. This is nice when dealing with notoriously sketchy merchants, such as digital camera dealers in New York that aren’t B&H Photo Video; it forces them to behave (and they are on Amazon!).