"I've heard people claim that affiliate commissions can get ripped
off by people stealing your affiliate ID. Is that true?" -- Bette Bonfleur
When your affiliate URL is visible, unscrupulous people can substitute
their own affiliate ID and effectively receive a discount on the sale,
so long as the merchant affiliate program is set up so that (1) later
affiliate cookies displace earlier ones and (2) customers can get affiliate
credit for sales made to themselves. (Wilson
Internet's affiliate program is set so neither of these apply.) But
even if the unscrupulous purchaser doesn't get credit for the sale, that
doesn't keep him from trying -- and you losing.
The best way to hide your affiliate URL is to use one of the numerous
affiliate cloaking programs out there. Essentially they do two things:
(1) open the affiliate site within a frame so that the shopper never sees
the real affiliate URL in their browser and (2) disguise the URL in the
source code by substituting ASCII numerical characters for their alpha-numeric
HTML equivalents, perhaps scrambling them as well. It's pretty difficult
(though not impossible) for an unethical customer to figure out the actual
URL and insert his own affiliate ID. Thus you're almost sure to receive
an affiliate commission if a sale is made.
I've seen the claims that 36% of affiliate commissions are stolen. I
have no way of verifying this and the figure seems too high to me, though
I'm sure some commissions are stolen. I've been concerned enough about
this to start using an affiliate link cloaking system myself. If you don't
have much affiliate commission revenue yet, don't bother. But if you are
starting to earn some significant money from commissions, this is probably
good insurance.
Several
affiliate link cloaking systems are available for $25 to $60, though I
haven't tested them. A couple of the better marketed programs are:
