Ever wonder why you never seem to sell anything through your affiliate links? Even when someone clicks on your ad or link, you still don’t get the sale. I bet you’d like to know why? The answer is usually cookie stuffing.
Cookie Stuffing is when a malicious website overwrites your affiliate cookie with their cookie, so they get paid the commission for the sale. It’s against their affiliate Terms of Service, but many affiliate programs don’t aggressively enforce it.
3 simple reasons you are screwed: Consumer Behavior, Merchant Behavior, and Thieves.
Consumer Behavior: If you ever bought something online, I know you are all guilty of the following. You get all the way to the checkout page of a website, see the price for the merchandise, see the price of shipping, and then see an empty box for “coupon code”. You type into Google “merchant name coupon code”, get the code, try it, and repeat until you get one that works. Sometimes you will give up and place the order anyway. Guess what, 99% chance you just robbed an honest affiliate of their commission and gave the money to a criminal.
Merchant Behavior: Merchants are just as guilty. Most of the merchants that display a box for the coupon code only do so because it came with the merchant software, and they thought it might be cool to offer a code for an upcoming holiday. Even the merchants that do offer regular codes don’t display them on the page, they hide them in emails or send them to coupon code sites directly. Guess what, merchant stupidity just eliminated 2% to 20% of their profit. Many people like to bookmark the merchant directly, and they’d never have to pay an affiliate a commission, except for the fact that they have that burning desire to display that empty coupon box.
Thieves: Let’s not forget about the people who are robbing both merchant and honest affiliates. Until these a-holes get dragged into court, they will continue their scam. How do they do it? This website is pretty much a how-to site on how thieves do cookie stuffing, it even outs the guilty people. The usual methods are scripts, 0 sized I-frames, and software programs like toolbars that intercept the browser data.
How to tell? How do you know if a website is stuffing cookies? Simply clear all cookies on your browser and then load their site and check all the cookies loaded. You may see 10-20 cookies being set, but none of them should be for a merchant. If you see something like bluehostaffiliate=website.com or amazonaffiliate=couponloser, then you have been stuffed. In essence, simply loading their page acts like you clicked each and every one of their ads.
What can be done?
- If you insist on searching for coupon codes, search ahead of time, write the codes down, and then clear your cookies.
- Just before purchasing, clear your browser’s cookies and then click on the merchant affiliate link from an honest affiliate.
- If you own a website, refuse to run ads for merchants who have a coupon code box at checkout.
- Pressure affiliate marketing companies to aggressively pursue cookie stuffers, and come up with alternate ways of recording sales.
- If you catch anyone stuffing cookies, report them to the merchant, their affiliate company, and even the FBI for racketeering. See how ebay recently sued a site for cookie stuffing.
- Run Pay-Per-Lead, Pay-Per-Impression, and Pay-Per-Click ads until the situation improves.
- Share your shopping links with friends, but educate them about cookie stuffing and how to prevent it.
- Merchants and affiliates, if you can’t live without the coupon code box, display coupon codes in your ad, or near the ad so people don’t feel the urge to search on the net.
Yes, I know most consumers don’t care about who gets the commission, as long as they get free shipping. Just remember next time you cry “My blog makes no money,” maybe now you know why.
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14 users commented in " Cookie Stuffing: The Reason You Can’t Sell Anything "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a Trackback **********Great post! I didn’t know that a lot of these things were getting in the way of people making a profit.
The things you learn! I had no idea about those codes. I will be honest I never have used a coupon code. I never knew where to get them and I thought you had to get it from the manufacturer. Thanks for the info.
I had no idea how those coupon sites actually worked. I suspected they had their codes attached to the codes, but I didn’t know about the cookies. Thanks for the info!
Awesome post! I must be one of the doofuses that get cookie stuffed because I never make any money on my blog. The only site that has paid me well has been the Rubicon Project, and it must have been a fluke. Thank you so much for telling us about this.
Yup. It’s a situation that really just sucks, and there’s *a lot* of cookie stuffers out there. People who appear reputable at first, too.
I guess not everyone realizes that you can’t put a price on integrity.
Rubicon looks like it gets paid for signing you up for other networks. Then picking ads and taking a portion of your profits. I don’t use them so I can’t report whether they are better or worse that any other network. As long as the ad says “revenue share” or “pay per sale” you are affected by this issue.
Great post. I buzzed this for you.Keep up the good work.
Beamer
Thanks for the information, I’ll try to follow your advice. Maybe someone can write a Firefox extension to alert users about this behavior not sure if that’s realistic or maybe one already exists.
Jim, I use a plugin called “view cookies” which shows me the obvious cookies being set. The problem is the scammers are always a step ahead, for example, if the cookie stuffer is software based, they might not stuff the cookie until the last moment, or use a method to edit the existing cookie. The safest way is to clear all cookies, then go to the website in question and see what has been installed.
Obviously you can’t police the net using this tactic. But if you come to a site where you think the owner is a scumbag, like a content thief, better to screw them every way possible so they get the message.
Thank you so much! I often search for coupons when seeing the box and I’d heard of cookie stuffing, but didn’t know what it was.
From now on every time I search for a coupon code, I’ll clear my cookies and take a look at what new cookies I’ve gotten and will report each one. I didn’t know this was against the law, but have never done it because it’s against my personal ethics.
I appreciate this post and will bookmark it so that next time I go coupon code searching, I can refresh my memory on the steps I need to take.
I will also stumble/digg this post.
Thank you so much!
Thanks again Turnip. I just cleared out my cookies. I have a questionable sale/commission to one of my affiliate prgms and this post answered a lot of questions for me.
Remember, using a link before shopping doesn’t change the price you pay at all. Since I can’t get credit for shopping with my own links, I always look for another marketer who has a link to that company. That way they get a dollar or two. It’s just another way website owners help each other out, like stumbling a post.
Now if you want to take that further, you can mention it to the person “hey, I just used your amazon.com link to buy some stuff” so that they can track the sale and make sure it went through. Good chance they will do something nice in return for your website.
I recently advised readers to use a Firefox extension to use coupons and codes. After reading your article I am thinking that is
probably not good advice. If I understand correctly using the codes would
give site with the codes a commission on the purchase instead of the blogger where
I clicked the ad?
Thanks, for you time. I realize now that I am not very informed about ads and how they work. I will need to study up. I appreciate you and the post.
The extension is probably using all the guys links, nothing more. Nice scam if you can program it. Guess what, even if he has no coupon, you are still giving him the commission, not the sight you clicked on.
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