Developing an affiliate program

Hi,

I am trying to get my head round affiliate schemes and how they work (technologically speaking). I am talking about the scenario where 3 parties are involved, the affiliate, the intermediary and the end shop selling the product (merchant).

How do, say, CJ track sales? In Google Adsense the tracking code that Google use to track sales resulting from Google clicks for statistics is a Javascript that produces an iframe, but if either the iframe or javascript fails it calls a tracking image. Why not just call this image in the first place and do away with the JS and iframe? There must be a good reason but it escapes me.

Also do cookies written from a http domain, eg. http://aspfree.com, present themselves to the SSL version of the same site, i.e. https://aspfree.com, reason I ask, is that if the diversion from the affiliate > intermediary > merchant writes a cookie on the merchants site with the affiliate ID, then usually the link goes to a http link, but the Order complete page is invariablly on a https page.

Any thoughts or detailed info would be much appreciated.

Bill

doing stuff client side like in javascript help reduce charge on server
A common example of this is form validation:
let say you get the user name and email
you validate (in javascript) that the user have correct information using the client machine before sending data.
then you validate it serverside (because some people dont have or disabled javascript)
so no invalid data get into server.

this way whan an error is catched client side(most of the time) it save the server processing when error occurs

I suppose google is doing such for similar reasons.

Thing is, all the JS is doing is building an iframe to show a tracking image.

The do things like


why not do it in one go (i.e. '<iframe>')? Is it an effort to combat privacy filters etc that might otherwise filter it out?

maybe google is just acting like microsoft.... weirdly

when you have html tags within javascript code it may cause havoc - for example having <script> written inside js code as part of string will cause chaos because the js compiler will see that as actual html tag - the compiler does not always check if the tags are part of string, at least in the old versions. as for cookies, they're seperate for each domain and probably seperate for SSL server as well.

Get it right, bint

lol... back to the good old argument eh?
well, I didn't want joe to get confused, so I used the more popular and familiar (but incorrect!) term.