Is Someone Stealing Away Your Affiliate Revenue?

There are several ways in which merchants track sales back to their affiliates and credit them with their commission. The most common one relies on planting a cookie in the surfer’s computer. As long as the cookie with that affiliate’s details is stored on that computer, the affiliate will get credit for any sales made.

When surfers choose to manually delete their cookies, or if they surf in “stealth mode” with cookies disabled, sales cannot be tracked back to the affiliate who referred the surfer.

That’s not the only problem though.

Some people deliberately and quite effectively steal sales by deleting your cookie and replacing it with their own.

You work hard on building a website, choosing a matching product, bringing the traffic and just as the surfer clicks on your affiliate link in order to make a purchase…… a nasty piece of software overrides your affiliate cookie with someone else’s cookie and rakes in your commission.

I’m not talking about some hidden viruses that the surfer got infected with. Nope. These are usually toolbars that the surfer knowingly (though not always willingly) installs. They are known among affiliates as parasiteware. And, at least in some cases, affiliate programs not only agree to this, but even cooperate. Actually, some of them directly benefit from this as well.

Their “revenue model” is simple and looks innocent enough to surfers:

Download our toolbar and every purchase you make on X,Y,Z website will generate a contribution towards a charity.

What they don’t tell you is that their toolbar uses the same kind of cookie as an affiliate, effectively deleting/overriding previous ones. If you got to the site through an affiliate link from a blog or a website, that blogger can kiss their commission goodbye – they won’t be getting anything from the traffic they worked so hard to get. The toolbar company on the other hand will be getting a commission, giving away a part of it to charity.

Is Your Income Effected?

As some of the largest websites and affiliate networks play along and even promote such toolbars, practically any affiliate that works with a large network is affected. The most common toolbar to employ this tactic can be found at OneCause.com. They cover merchants such as Amazon, Ebay, Expedia, CafePress and hundreds more. If you promote any of the merchants on their list, you are losing some money.

Note how the percentage of the money that goes towards charity is significantly lower than the real affiliate commission offered by these merchants. Hmmmm, could it be that OneCause is in it for the profit?

What Can You Do?

Affiliate education is the first step. I recommend visiting the forums at ABestWeb where they specialize in affiliate marketing. While there, make sure you check the parasiteware forum and this thread.

If you find out that you’re promoting merchants that are involved in this practice consider changing to another merchant, if you can. At the very least, write to them and let them know you don’t like it.

Having done my research, I can recommend one decent affiliate network that makes a point of not cooperating with parasiteware: ShareaSale (yes, that’s an affiliate link right there!) It is not the only network I work with, but it does have some very good niche sponsors, great support and they’re committed to helping their affiliates make money.