It is very important that you protect your affiliate commissions from hackers. By not protecting your links, you make it easy for others to edit your links and steal your commission. This is a major problem and any serious marketer will take quick action to stop this from happening. Here one simple ways to protect your affiliate links from commission hackers. Hide/Cloak your links from others. Cloaking your link means to hide the url from others by displaying another url in the bar. This can be easily done by using a free tracking or free URL cloaking services online. Make sure that you check your affiliates TOS (terms of service) to make sure you're not violating it in any kind of way. Add this to your things to do right now as you don't want another sale to slip pass you. I recommend iTrackerPro.com as you can track and cloak unlimited URLs plus advertise your business for free with the Text Ad and Banner Exchange.
And then you throw in another redirect and when the POS service that you are using goes down so does your link. And redirects may trigger some security software or browsers to strip your cookie and you don't get paid. So for every pro there is a con. So if you can't host your own redirects I'd advise anyone who really wants to make affiliate income pass on the 3rd party sites. But what do I know, I just do this for the money. The average consumer is NOT trying to steal your affiliate commissions and those who are ... won't be buying form you anyways.
I appreciate your comment but not all sites are there to harm affiliate links. There are tons of sites on the net who use different methods to protect affiliate links. Knowing somewhat of php programming myself not all urls are cloaked via redirection.
If you are selling products for the geeks, forget about cloaking your affiliate links because they know how to change the affiliate links. I'm a full-time ebiz guy and I don't cloak my affiliate links because I give generous bonus gifts of their choice. I don't give them useless or irrelevant stuffs. They can choose from my inventory of more than 500 digital products. Other marketers wouldn't allow their buyers to choose bonus gifts because it is a time-consuming process.
I've heard this many times before, and I still don't understand one thing: how exactly can anyone ever "steal" commissions from you just by seeing your PID # in a link? It doesn't make sense...unless they are actually hacking into your page code and putting their PID in your links...?
Visitors sometimes remove everything after the "/" in the URL which takes them back to the main page of your affiliate site and now you're no longer the referrer of that visitor unless the site is using cookies to store it's affiliates id. This is what consider to be "hacking" your affiliate commissions.
I've created a cloaker that prevents commission stealing: - It hides the affilliate URL - It guarantees cookie placement even if user does not click the link - It prevents commission theft/editing URL http://aff.ispeed.com/file.php
Why not just get a 0.99 .info from godaddy and forward that? Works for me. Maybe i don't know anything and just think i do?
This works great if you're marketing just one product as I think some domain registration sites offer a masking option when forwarding but for marketing multiple products some can't afford to spend that on each url.