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For the last few years, Bing Cashback offered shoppers cash back rewards when they bought merchandise from some partners and advertisers on Microsoft's search engine. Most of the time these cash-back offers ranged between 2% and 10% of the price of the product. Now, however, Microsoft has decided to retire this feature. According to a post on the Bing blog, Microsoft "did not see the broad adoption that [it] had hoped for."

When Bing debuted a feature called Cashback, the product was intended to save users money while they shopped from online retailers.

As we told you last month when discussing the program's early successes, Cashback works by giving users a certain amount of money back every time they search for an item and then buy it from a participating store. But some users have found the opposite to be true: Retailer cookies trigger jacked-up prices for some items, causing a phenomenon one man calls "negative cashback." How much do Bing users stand to lose? Read on, and brace yourselves.