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%+)
Doesnt the Honey extension do the same thing?
I use “Sandboxie” where you can open multiple sessions of Chrome at the same time just by opening Chrome (or any browser) in a separate “Sandbox”. For shopping I open a separate “Sandboxed” session of Chrome and disable all extensions.
It is one of those rare software I actually paid for (life time licence) and has been of immense help.
I can also try out a software by installing them in a separate “Sandbox” and it makes it very easy to uninstall that program just by deleting contacts without worrying about them corrupting your registry or doing anything funny to your computer.
Best money spent ever!
haha thats too advanced for most people. remember, these guys willingly use Drop and gave their bank logins. i was gonna say a blurb about extensions being a very easy vector of malware attack and should never be used on primary PC, but never-mind…
Did not understand what is the issue with adblock and not tracking you mentioned?
Adblock is the biggest thing that’s known to disrupt portals. Never use portals with adblock. Either use a different browser/profile which does not have adblock or disable the adblock from the shopping portal website.
On a not-so related note, did you know that Norton is flagging doctorofcredit as unsafe?
Hi WR,
Aware of this issue. It’s a false positive, Norton says it will take up to two weeks to fix the issue. So ridiculous.
I remember one of the android reddit application (reddit news or reddit sync) was also adding Amazon referral . This was caught by some users in /r/android . Who knows how many apps or extensions are doing the same.
Its extremely important to keep a virgin browser just for portals.I use IE! This is just a given.
What is IE?
Internet Explorer
The Internet Explorer browser.
This is most definitely against Amazon’s affiliate program terms of service. You should contact Amazon and report the offender. They need to get what’s coming to them which is their account nuked and forfeit their affiliate income ideally with punitive clawback.
So nobody knows which specific extension it is?
I put a link in the post about that.
I believe it was determined that it was the FBA Calculator extension
How much credence do you give to Vinh’s assertion that you need to start with an empty cart to get B6 to track? That hasn’t been my experience, but I haven’t catalogued it very scientifically. Vinh is the sketchiest guy in the biz so it’s hard to know what to believe.
Vinh is not “sketchy” at all, he is trustworthy and provides lots of good information. Perhaps the phrase you are looking for is “less risk averse”, or “adventurous”, or “balls to the wall”…. but he isn’t sketchy. If we didn’t have his countless data points, especially regarding shutdowns, many of us would have no idea how far/hard we can safely push various avenues of MS, etc. Regardless, I don’t know why you wouldn’t take his word at face value… he has absolutely nothing to gain from sharing it, and there is absolutely nothing for you to lose by following those few extra precautions when using shopping portals… it may be a little more of a hassle, but if it gets you paid, so what? Chill.
stvr, I know some portal backends require adding to cart afterward. I also know that I’ve had success without doing so many times, probably depends on the portal backend.
I don’t have any experience with Amazon specifically. Have you had success with Amazon specifically?
I was told this by Jetblue Customer Service.