Someone Stole Your Commission

By Bob Bishop
Posted Tuesday, August 10, 2004

If you use affiliate programs you may not be getting all the commissions you deserve!

Hijacking is what happens when someone replaces your affiliate id with theirs in the affiliate link. Let’s say your affiliate ID is cyberbooks and the product site is (www.affiliatelife.com). Then your affiliate link would be (www.affiliatelife.com/?cyberbooks).

Say the highjacker uses the affiliate ID of captain-hook. What he would do is replace your ID with his, and buy from the URL (www.affiliatelife.com/?captain-hook).

Bypassing is what happens when someone sees an affiliate link and is either unfamiliar and uncomfortable with it, or just can’t stand the idea of your getting a commission (even though you’ve done the work to put the information in front of them).

So instead of buying from (www.affiliatelife.com/?cyberbooks), the bypasser will simply “chop off” the affiliate ID at the end and simply buy from the plain URL (www.affiliate.com) --without your affiliate ID attached!

The bottom line: You don’t get your commission, and the hijacker puts your money in his pocket, in the form of a discount, by buying through his own affiliate link. Unfortunately, as long as people can see an affiliate code in the link that you offer them, a certain number of them are destined to hijack it – or bypass it.

If you’re using PayPal to sell digital products check your source code. In that code is the link to your thank you page which many people use as the download page for their digital product. All someone has to do is copy that link in your source code and voila’, they’re at your download page without having to pay for your product!

Your best bet to overcome this problem is to do some research and find some software that will cloak your affiliate links or hide your code.

This is something you should take care of before you start losing money!

About The Author
Bob Bishop is the publisher of the free “Traffic Tip of the Day” newsletter.
(http://www.internettraffictips.com/) Get a free copy of the Ultimate Link Tracker when you sign up for our newsletter!