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.

Collaborating through the AMC, the affiliate networks who are IAB members will adhere to the following set of standards from January 1st 2009.

• - Using ‘Click to Reveal’ when there is no valid or current code present is not permitted of affiliate publishers including using ‘Click to Reveal’ to show any deals/offers/sales instead of vouchers.
• - Voucher code affiliate publishers must clearly detail the voucher offer that will be revealed by the click.
• - A valid code is defined as a code that has been legitimately issued by a merchant for use online. This code will have an activation date and where necessary a deactivation date.
• - Voucher code directories must contain clear categorization and separation between deals/offers/sales and discount codes.