Voucher Code Sites

admin — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 15:41:10 +0000

Over the last few years many online shoppers have grown to the idea that they can bargain hunt by means of a digital voucher codes. There has been a steady emergence of voucher code websites that list all of the leading merchants in a directory style listing and offer discount codes for that site.

These types of sites are not all that they appear to be. Effectively they are designed to save you money, that much is true, but there is the dark side to these sites that you simply may not know. Of course you wouldn’t know because they won’t tell you, but they are stuffing computer cookies into your system by means of ‘forced clicking’.

Many of the voucher code websites hide the voucher code behind a link, they will ask you to click the link in order to reveal the voucher code, and when the link is clicked the merchant site is opened in a new window and the code is revealed on their own site. What you may not have realised is that when this link is clicked, a special piece of code called a ‘cookie’, will be placed into your computer system without your prior knowledge.

Cookies are small pieces of code usually created to remember passwords and browser history to save you having to keep logging into sites. The cookies dropped onto your machine can also be used to track online sales. If you were to go to Amazon through a link on a voucher code website, that link will drop a cookie into your machine that will tell Amazon that you found them through the voucher code site, hence it ‘remembers’ where you came from. If you were to go on and make a purchase from Amazon, then the owner(s) of the voucher code site would get a percentage based commission on that sale.

Hopefully, new guidelines which come into effect on 1st January 2009 should help to stop legitimate affiliates losing out to cookie-dropping voucher code sites.

Authors: Terrence Burrows and Think Affiliate
Terry Burrows is the owner of Shopastop.co.uk and has been in the online shopping field for nearly 5 years.

Cookie Stuffing

admin — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 13:45:28 +0000

Cookie stuffing is a way of forcing clicks to affiliate programs without the visitor actually having to take any action, such as clicking a banner. This means that if a person who has visited a site which has stuffed cookies then goes on to make a purchase, the owner of the cookie stuffing site gets credited for the transaction if a cookie for that merchant was set. This means that if the visitor actually found the merchants site through the target sites own PPC programme; they are effectively paying twice for the sale.
There are many different ways to implement cookie stuffing, but most networks and programmes strictly prohibit against it in their T&C’s. If a site is found to be doing this, they are very likely to have commissions withheld or rejected. Although you might think you can make some quick money, cookie stuffing is very bad for the affiliate marketing industry. Think how you would feel if you forwarded a potential customer to an advertiser through one of your affiliate links, but somebody else got paid the commission instead as they had forced a cookie onto the referred customers PC.
Cookie stuffing can be done using HTML tags, iframes or more advanced methods. All of these have the same effect – cookies are forced onto the visitor’s machine without their knowledge or consent.

Think Affiliate » cookies

Voucher Code Sites

Cookie Stuffing