Introduction
We talk a lot about using shopping portals as a means of saving money on everyday shopping, or even using it to make a profit or pull in free miles. One of the problems with shopping portals is that the purchases don’t always show up correctly with the portal – they fail to track. When this happens, we’re at the mercy of customer service reps to help us out. Worse yet is when using a portal in a way that doesn’t fit with the official terms; for example, using the Discover portal and not paying with a Discover card or using the Chase portal and not paying with a Chase card. In those cases, there’s no way to get the credit if it doesn’t post automatically.
Many things can interfere with the portal tracking correctly – AdBlock being the most commonly mentioned. However, the most crucial thing is to make sure your final click-through is done using the intended shopping portal. If you browse a few shopping portals to see their rates, be sure that the last click-through is done through the correct portal.
Website Cookies
More confusingly, many websites have their own portal-like tracking which earns them a commission on the purchase. For example, any link you click on Slickdeals is coded as such that it will have a Slickdeals cookie on it.
Consider this very real scenario: you go to your favorite shopping portal and click through the portal to Staples.com for a recent deal that came up. However, after browsing the Staples site for a minute or two, you can’t find the deal. No problem – you head back to Slickdeals where you saw it and click on their link to Staples and find the item number there. Then you head back to the window/tab you were shopping in, input the item number, and make the purchase. In this case, Slickdeals will get a commission, and you probably won’t get anything.
Not only do sites like Slickdeals, Fatwallet, and Retailmenot have their own cookies attached, even blogs like DoC and many others have these cookies. The most common are Amazon and eBay links, and those are the link we have currently on DoC. Some blogs have links to many other websites as well, and it’s worth being cautious with all links you click on if you want to get your own portal credit.
[The reason we put affiliate links for eBay and Amazon is not to hinder portal-users; rather, it’s for the many people who don’t bother with shopping portals at all and these links create a revenue stream for the site.]
How to Avoid Problems
One common way of avoiding all issues is to use a separate browser for shopping, different from your regular browser. You can then click away in your main browser and it won’t affect any tracking in your shopping browser.
Another popular method, the subject of this post, is using incognito or private browsing to complete the purchase. Private browsing is a cookie-free browser and clean from any link to your main browsing session, which is why you’ll have to log-in to each site again as the information does not carry over from the main browser.
Incognito is Not Completely Separate
I was bewildered to learn that regular browsing and private browsing can share the same cookie tracking and mess up shopping portal records.
Here’s what happened: I went through Shopping Portal A incognito to Merchant XYZ, then clicked through Shopping Portal B in the regular browser to Merchant XYZ, and proceeded to make the purchase in the private browser. Yet, the next day the confirmation came in from Shopping Portal B confirming the purchase!
What’s Going On?
At the time, I had a different theory as to what’s going on – it didn’t even occur to me the possibility that private browsing shared any tracking with the regular browser. When I ran the scenario by my friend Rich from the Dollar Dig shopping portal (you may remember him from an interview we once did), he was stumped for a moment as well.
A few minutes later minute later he emailed me back that he figured it out: “Aha! Got it figured out. With all the SSL/TLS/SSH related bugs, new and improved security features are released. And apparently they have some side effects: https://www.pcworld.com/article/2865297/super-cookies-can-track-you-even-in-private-browsing-mode-researcher-says.html.”
Basically, some new security feature (called HTHS) is having this side effect of cross-tracking the regular and private browsing modes.
Replicating the Experiment
I was skeptical of his explanation, mostly because I don’t fully understand it, but, amazingly, I was able to replicate the experiment multiple times, both in Chrome and Safari. When clicking through Portal A in private mode and then Portal B in regular mode, the portal tracking invariably went to Portal B, despite the actual purchase being completed in private mode.
It’s possible that this won’t affect all browsers the same, all portals the same, or all merchants the same; my tests were all with one specific merchant and two specific portals. In any case, the phenomenon clearly exists.
I also tested out cross-tracking different browsers, but that didn’t happen. Two browsers will never share information between them.
Note that there still are advantages of using private browsing over your regular browser as private browsing will typically disable things like AdBlock which can impede portal tracking.
My Thoughts
I was very surprised to find out that incognito doesn’t always keep separate tracking, and stunned that it was easy to replicate the experiment.
On the few occasions of a portal not tracking correctly, I’ve always written it off as ‘the damn portal’ or ‘the damn merchant’, yet it’s quite possible that some of those mess-ups were entirely my fault due to the crossing between public and private browsing.
Going forward, I still use incognito often to disable any add-ons, but I’m starting to use my regular browser sometimes. Best would be to use a separate, clean browser for shopping, but I haven’t worked out all the auto-fills for other browsers other than my main Chrome browser.
Further Reading:
