Go2-Url.com May Be Stealing Your Ebay Commisions
By Paul • Dec 23rd, 2007 • Category: Featured, Miscellaneous, News and Commentary
The Image on the left was captured after testing a service called Go2-Url.com, a tracking / url shorting service. The benefits of these types of services can be beneficial if you wish to protect your affiliate urls or wish to not send out a long url in communication via email or other advertising venues.
There are many different URL shortening services available on the Internet. What made me take note of this one is the sales pitch they use to recruit you to their service.
Go2-URL.Com PREVENTS the #1 reason
affiliate marketers lose sales commissionsAll affiliate programs provide you with a ’special’ web address (URL) to give prospects to buy their product or service. These URL’s are often very long, and always very confusing, but more importantly they are avoided by many who would click on them. You see, some people will not click on an affiliate URL because they do not want other people making money on their purchases. This reluctance to click affiliate URL’s results is lost commissions, and that is money out of YOUR pocket!
Don’t let this ‘commission theft‘ occur to your marketing efforts. The Go2-URL.Com system will take those long, confusing affiliate URL’s and make them very short and not distiguishable (sic)as an affiliate web address.
They are claiming that their service will protect your affiliate commissions, while at the same time stealing commissions from marketers by overwriting their cookies.
I first became aware of this when I was sent unsolicited email from a well know Internet Marketer promoting another service. I saw that Amazon cookies were being placed on my machine when I clicked on his link and decided to investigate further. While I was not able to capture those cookies I decided to do an independent test.
I created a tracking link for www.imscamalert.com and captured the Ebay cookie being planted on my machine. Nowhere in the terms of service at go2-url.com do they tell users that they will be placing their affiliate cookies when using their service.
The problem I have with this is they are touting that using their service will stop “Commission Theft” while at the same time they are potentially stealing from their users.
For those that do not know, cookies are how your affiliate commissions are tracked and credited through various affiliate networks. The Ebay.com cookie last for 30 days if you are recruiting new sellers and 7 days if you are promoting and auction through the CJ.com network. If you are actively using this service and promoting Ebay.com online, the service that claims to protect you may actually be taking your income.
The law of the land in affiliate marketing says the last cookie wins. Imagine you send a surfer to Ebay.com from one of your sites and they place an auction bid, which will end in three days. Now if that surfer clicks on any go2-url link and and goes back to Ebay.com to bid on any other auction or to increase their bid on the auction that your referred them to you have lost several commissions. Even worse is if they sign up top become a seller!! All of your prior work promoting Ebay.com goes down the drain because they clicked a link from them.
This may or not be a violation of the Ebay.com affiliate program. I have asked for their feedback and will post a follow up when Ebay.com gives their feedback. Good luck in your online marketing effort just make sure to do due diligence before taking any sales page for granted. Make sure you test services before using them in your marketing efforts if not you may be poorer for the process.
<<Update>> I have asked at the Ebay.com forum and this practice of “Cookie Stuffing” appears to be a violation of Ebay.com TOS. Still waiting for official word from Ebay.com.
Paul is Is a full time affiliate marketer and father of 5 children, who owns, manages and publishes on various mediums via the World Wide Web.
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Wow, Paul, good job!
I think that the more popular tinyurl.com is clean of thieving practices, or? They monetize their site with Adsense. Naturally, not as appealing as amazon/ ebay commissions on top…
Personally I use (http://photo-facelift.com/short-safe-links ) for easy link management so I can be in full control as well as have traffic to my sites rather than via 3rd party…
Happy XMas,
CurlyGirly
Thanks CurlyGirly,
I do plan on offering some free scripts and stuff in the future for people to use.
This site has gone from concept to being viable, based on traffic counts etc.
The practice they are doing is against both affiliate programs. Cookie stuffing is
highly unethical and I have another post about it after I receive feedback from
ebay. What is funny is someone directed them to this post and it looks like they
have stopped it. I am sure that ebay, amazon and CJ will not be impressed.
I also have plenty of digital documentation to back it up as well as some big affiliates
and sellers from ebay are on this as well and have the documentation.
I may even have use for your services on another project.
Merry Xmas
Paul
For some reason my browser doesn’t show this page correctly…However,
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Ron Park The Fraud Master DO Not trust this guy .– All of Southern Arizona Tucson Real Estate Daily http://www.tredaily.com 1873 N Kolb Rd Tucson AZ 85719 Ph. – (800) 536-7480 About TRE Daily TRE (Tucson Real Estate) Daily is a fraudulent one-stop Tucson less then quality real estate resources. Ron Park a self proclaimed homo sexual, and member of Tucson REALTORS fraud, is the manager of TRE Daily. Before Ron Park became a real estate agent/lead manager in August 2007, he was a male prostitute selling himself successfully online and on the Tuscon streets for 7 years. After learning the ins-and-outs of sucking dick, he entered into Tucson?s real estate market after a night of longing passion with his male boss to provide oral services that are rarely found, but certainly needed.
http://www.tredaily.com
Both Ron and Lisa Park are SCAMMERs Watch out for them.
i have just signed up with the amazon affiliate program and i am still not earning a good deal of cash from them.~’`
I’m also into affiliate marketing and I have been using “mylinksentry.com” to shorten my urls, I also noticed that using their service does not make me as successful as using the real long and original link, I need someone to help me find out please. If this url shortening service is being dishonest I will certainly stop using it and advice other people to beware.
Thank you in advance
Victor
hey,this is Victor Corcoran,just observed your Blog on google and i must say this blog is great.may I quote some of the writing found in the weblog to my local students?i’m not sure and what you think?anyway,Thank you!
We really liked your writing style, keep up the good work.
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Amazon Affiliate program pays much better than other affiliate programs out there.-,.
Almost everyone that makesan income on the internet (even the millionaires) do so through affiliate marketing. Being successful in affiliate marketing involves applying the formula that makes other affiliate marketers successful. For instance, autoblogging. Autoblogging has been one of the least well-known forms of making money online for quite some time… basically because it’s quite difficult to make a good auto-blog. Yet, when done right, it can provide you with a constant passive income with the only real work required being the setting up process. Video Marketing, and several other marketing strategies are all designed to drive traffic to your site, can be incorporated gradually in order to raise the position your site appears in the SERPs when someone searches for a term related to your site. And yet, even this can be totally automated.