Milesperday posted today something fascinating. My initial reaction was just to include it in the daily Recap, but I thought this was vital enough to warrant it’s own post.
Apparently, there’s one specific Chrome Extension which highjacks and negates any Amazon affiliate links tracking by adding their own affiliate link. So if you go through the JetBlue portal to get 3x points per dollar, you won’t get any credit from the purchase since the Chrome extension automatically adds themselves in as the final affiliate who directed you to Amazon.
In other words, this crafty developer added into their extension that any time you go to Amazon.com it will be as if they had sent you there and they’ll get the Amazon affiliate commission.
The specific extension under discussion is probably one that has to do with FBA sellers, so this is especially important to share with friends who are Amazon sellers.
There might even be legal issues with what the extension is doing. Amazon pays out those who send them traffic which results in a purchase. But this Chrome extension never sent them the traffic. JetBlue did. Or no one did (you just typed in amazon.com directly). This developer is essentially fooling Amazon to think that they sent them this traffic when they didn’t.
Anyway, that doesn’t matter much for our purposes, but what matters is to be aware of the issue. And if this extension can do so for Amazon, there’s always a remote chance that another extension does the same for Amazon or other retailers too, and will negate the shopping portal.
This all brings home the point that we should probably all be shopping in a separate, clean browsing session for shopping portals. Even if you don’t want to go incognito each time (since that will necessitate signing in on the portal and on the retailer’s website each time), you can set up a separate Chrome profile just for shopping. Leave this Chrome profile completely clean of any and all extensions, especially Adblock.
If you use the incognito option, make sure your incognito is set up not to run Chrome extensions, especially Adblock. If you use the Shopping profile option, it won’t ever have any extensions carry over from your main profile so you don’t have to worry about that.
There is the hassle of the initial setup and signing into each account once, but after that you just have to remember signing into your account one time when using your Shopping profile You can see a walkthrough on adding Chrome profiles in this Frequentmiler post.
To review and update your current Chrome extensions, type: “chrome://extensions/” (without the quotes) into the URL bar.
Related Posts:
- Shopping Portals: Expensive Lesson Learned about Shopping In-Private Mode
- Using Amazon Smile for Charity and Stacking with Shopping Portal
- Complete Guide To Saving Money On Amazon (Save 8% – 27%+)
