I must admit that I’ve never heard of Jellyfish before. Considering the name, I wondered if the founders thought about the name association – “Buy with us and you’ll get stung!”.

Digging into the details, it appears Jellyfish is the type of shopping engine I wish I had found BEFORE Microsoft–’cos you just know they’ll screw it up.

So why do I like the sound of Jellyfish? Here’s what got my attention:

You use Jellyfish.com just like you would any other shopping search engine to find the right product at the best price. But when you actually buy something from a store in our engine, we share at least half of what we earn by connecting you to that store. All you need to do is sign up for an account to earn cash back. There are no fees or hidden charges.

You mean, I get paid to shop? Where’s my wallet?

Here’s an example search result, complete with details of how much you’ll get back in cash…

The great thing is, this is not just some gimmick for Jellyfish, they’ve actually given a lot of thought to their business model.

At Jellyfish, we want to pioneer a new form of search advertising we call Value Per Action. Instead of charging fees when you click, we charge our advertisers only when you actually buy, and we share at least half of this fee back to you as cash back. In other words, we connect you directly to the value of the advertising. Instead of measuring how much money WE make when you click, we measure how much value the advertiser is willing to pay YOU for your sale. With VPA, the advertising value of your attention becomes transparent (you can see it in the form of cash back) and changes from annoying advertising into something that actually lowers your end price.

A good buy for Microsoft: nice design, hot vertical, and smart advertising model. Let’s hope they don’t mess with it too much.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m about to waste my entire day hunting Jellyfish.

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Microsoft Reels In Jellyfish

"We only have one question for you: Why would you ever buy anywhere else?" Jellyfish asks in its About page. Microsoft must have decided the only way to answer that question was to buy the company asking it.

Microsoft’s Live Search blog announced the acquisition. They cited the innovative work Jellyfish has performed with comparative shopping engines, and how their product will be incorporated into the shopping efforts on Live Search.

Jellyfish shares at least half of each dollar they make on a sale performed through their site. Customers can sign up for a free membership to participate in the cash-back program.

That cash-back feature, which applies to most but not all of the merchants participating in Jellyfish, sets it apart from competing shopping engines. Since this is cost per action (CPA) revenue, the dollars can add up fast for active shoppers.

If Microsoft refrains from messing with that cash-back feature, they will have a real differentiator from what Yahoo and Google offer with their product searches. It’s a true competitive edge that people can understand easily – shopping through Live Search and Jellyfish equals money back.

Jellyfish allows users to shop by store or by category, in addition to general-purpose, at-large queries. It features a merchant rating system that can result in the removal of vendors that offer continually unsatisfactory service. And the kicker: the “Jellyfish.com cash back promise” that earmarks “at least half of every $1 we earn when you shop and buy products using Jellyfish.com” for the user.

The site’s main page boasts of 2.3 percent cash back from Best Buy, 4.0 percent from Barnes and Noble, and 5.3 percent from Sears. I briefly scanned some merchant listings, and the highest cash back percentage I noticed was 22.5 percent from All-Ink.com. While not everyone on Jellyfish offers this much cash back, any little bit helps.

There’s a lot of information of the “About Us” variety, explaining the site’s concepts, reasoning, and guarantees, but it’s intuitive enough for users to jump in and begin shopping, too. The one roadblock is the required account set-up, but this is a free process, and goes by quickly enough.

Jellyfish looks extremely promising. It’s not so amazing as to make comparison-shopping a thing of the past, but this site (the odd name of which is not explained, as far as I could see) and its cash back promise are definitely worth a look.

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Doug is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest eBusiness news.