This is the first post in a series giving a firsthand look at how the loyalty affiliate browser plugins work.
I’m hoping that by doing this, in conjunction with others who are doing similar screencasts, we can raise some visibility to this unfair practice in affiliate marketing.
First up is we-care.com. I’ve been using and watching this plugin for a week or two. In short, it always pops up, giving the user the choice of giving to their we-care.com cause from their purchase. It pops up indiscriminiately, no matter how the user gets to the merchant site (affiliate, PPC, search, direct type-ins) as I’ll demonstrate in the video below.
From what I can tell, they do not ever redirect automatically like some do.
Actually, that’s not entirely true. They do allow their users to configure the plugin, at least on Firefox, to that it does not “Warn before redirecting”. In this case it will try to redirect without warning, regardless of where the traffic comes from.
Unfortunately for we-care and their users, the automatic redirect URL produces a 404 error on the we-care.com site. Apparently they have this mis-configured, or not set up yet. If they had this designed properly, it would redirect automatically and invisibly every time. (Sorry, I didn’t capture this in the video. Maybe I’ll do another.)
There’s the basic overview. Click to watch the video to see this toolbar in action.
Is this useful? Let me know in the comments.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
