Ok, I'm sure most of you have heard of greasypalm.com. Basically, they get people to sign up and shop on sites where they have joined the affiliate program. Then, they split the affiliate income 50/50 with the shopper. My question is technically, how does this work. Presumably on popular sites they will have dozens of affiliate comissions every day. But how do they link them to a particular user. Do users have to forward Greasy Palm purchase confirmation and then they try to match the time & whether the person clicked on one of their affiliate links around that time? To put this another way, if I clicked on one of their affiliate links, cleared my cookies/ overwrote my cookies with another affiliate cookie for that site and then asked for payment of my half affiliate comission, how could they prove one way or another if I had earned them a commission? Sorry for the convoluted question, but this has really been bothering me! I don't have an account with them and don't fancy doing that just to satisfy my curiousity so I'm hoping someone here knows the answer...
Emmawatson, I am not sure how greasypalm works, but i am a member of ebuyandsave.co.uk, a similar site as greasypalm but which pays back 75% of the commission. The way it works is, you need to first log in to ebuyandsave.co.uk, all clicks are than tracked and you do not need to send in your transaction details, etc, the cashback is automatically credited to your account and you are paid. Somewhere on the site it does mention that if you have visited the merchant site earlier, it would be worth clearing your cookies, before going to the merchant via ebuyandsave, so that the credit does not go to the affiliate who you first visited from. Remember most merchants have a 30 day cookie period, what this means is if you visit a merchant via ebuyandsave and do not buy anything, but after a few days you visit the merchant by typing the web address directly, you will still get paid the cashback if the merchant has a 30 day or 15 day active cookie policy. Being a software programmer, I know it is quite easy to track which member clicks a link and goes on to buy. It is a two way process with the merchant sending the site owner a report of all the links that produced a sale and the commission figures. In layman language, your username could be sent as part of the link to track a sale, which is passed back when a sale occurs. All the best.. there are quite a few cashback sites, so do your research before joining. My preferred and trusted one is ebuyandsave.co.uk