This is a Private Article Only Available to Registered Affiliates

This is an important question, so let me state it clearly:

If an Affiliate Link Relies on Cookies to Track Purchases and Pay 30%, What Happens When Someone Deletes Their Cookies?

We want Affiliates to understand the high priority we have placed on the security of their financial connections with BooksOnline.Club as well as the secure system we have programmed into our Affiliate tracking and payout system. We addressed and solved two major priorities for all our Affiliates.

First, we needed to have a way for customers to pay for their online books within an extremely secure payment system where our customers cannot possibly get hacked or have their private financial information stolen from BooksOnline.Club servers. Our Affiliates also need to know that their financial connection with BooksOnline.Club is absolutely secure and safe from hackers.

1. BooksOnline.Club never collects or stores private financial or banking information from customers or affiliates. We never collect it, so it never sees the light of day on our server. Because we never collect your personal financial information, it is never stored on our servers. This means that even a breach of our highly secured server cannot reveal your personal financial information.
2. If BooksOnline doesn’t have access to customer and affiliate private financial information, who gets it when we complete a form and submit our banking information to become a customer or an affiliate?
   1. Consumers pay through the secure online payments systems they are used to using with their credit cards, PayPal, Stripe and so on. All of those systems have some of the highest known security systems in the world. BooksOnline.Club does not compete with them, so your transactions through those payments systems are built on super encrypted and secured hardened systems.
   2. As an Affiliate, when you complete your Affiliate submission to connect your bank account so you can receive your affiliate fees, your information does not go to BooksOnline either. It is sent by encryption to Plaid or Stripe via your own bank, so even then it is never sent over the Internet so anyone can translate it. Plaid is a service used by many major banks and financial institutions in the U.S. because they have built one of the most secure systems in the world. I’ve written a detailed article about how secure these systems are for Affiliates when they connect their bank accounts to our payments system. You can read that article at Secure Your Affiliate Payouts With Confidence. That article is available to the public and customers of our bookstore, but this article is not open to the public–only Affiliates.

Second, we had to develop an affiliate program that Affiliates could rely on not only for the security of their accounts, but Affiliates need to know that their referrals cannot be lost, and all the customers who purchase books through their affiliate link will remain permanent referrals from whom they will always get paid 30% when they purchase an eBook or audiobook.

For the inquisitive Affiliate, several questions may eventually surface on their mind:

1. If my affiliate link has a unique code at the end of the URL that identifies me as the Affiliate who will earn 30%, how secure is that link or the code at the end of that URL? What keeps the connection between the Affiliate and the customer?
   1. BooksOnline’s affiliate program issues a permanent and unique primary URL to each Affiliate, and that unique URL never changes at BooksOnline. No one, not even the administrator, can change the primary affiliate link issued to an Affiliate.
   2. When an Affiliate creates a custom affiliate link, the same is true. The link is permanent and cannot be changed, although for custom affiliate links an Affiliate can edit the primary link URL. This means if a link to a book changed, which is very unlikely, an Affiliate could update that link, but the custom link to that book would remain the same.
2. If a buyer visits BooksOnline and uses an Affiliate’s unique URL to purchase a book, how will BooksOnline know when that customer belongs to that Affiliate later when they revisit BooksOnline?
   1. Affiliate links are recognized at BooksOnline because of “cookies.” If you have a login user ID and password on any online site, it recognizes you because a cookie sees your browser’s unique ID. BooksOnline recognizes that customer and their connection with their Affiliate through the same technology.
3. Is it true that the Affiliate program relies upon cookies to identify a customer’s Affiliate, and if that is true, what happens if a customer clears their cache and deletes all cookies on their browser? Will BooksOnline recognize them since their cookies are gone?
   1. It is true that cookies are one of the ways a customer is recognized, and it is also true that if a customer deletes the cookies on their browser and revisits BooksOnline, the cookie is not there to be identified. BooksOnline has prepared for that eventuality and programmed protection for all Affiliates and their customers, and we’ll answer that next.
4. Is there a permanent way for BooksOnline to recognize the connection between a customer and an Affiliate without cookies?
   1. Yes, BooksOnline has added another layer of protection to maintain the integrity of our affiliate system and the years of data that must be managed. We have programmed our affiliate program to recognize customers and Affiliates through cookies and through their email. That’s the one thing that always will identify someone as a customer or Affiliate–their email. We still use cookies, but we also have email as an identifier if someone should clear the cache and delete all cookies on their browser. Clearing the cache on a browser like Chrome might be necessary from time to time, especially if you are coding and managing websites as an administrator, but it is not a good idea to delete all your cookies, because you’ll also delete your connection with all the services you login into, and for most of us, that could mean dozens of important websites and online services will not recognize you any more, and you will need to login with your original user ID and password for all of those sites.
5. Is there another way that someone who owns a domain with a website or podcast can connect their domain so that it becomes a permanent Affiliate link for anyone who comes from that domain to BooksOnline? In other words, so they wouldn’t have to rely on a unique affiliate link, but would still get credit for every referral and earn 30%?
   1. There is another great way to get credit for being an Affiliate and earn 30%, and this method doesn’t use cookies, and it does not rely on an email address either. If you have a website or podcast URL from which you would like to send consumers or other Affiliates to BooksOnline, you can submit your main home page URL to BooksOnline, and once we approve it in our Affiliate system, your website becomes an Affiliate website. You can have any link from your website to BooksOnline and get credit just like you would if you used your Affiliate link. This program is called “Direct Link”.
   2. Example: As an Affiliate you submit your website URL to BooksOnline.Club for approval as a Direct Website link, and one you’re approved, you could have a simple link on your website that says “Buy [book title] Now” and give that quote a hyperlink to the public URL of that book at BooksOnline.Club. You don’t need to use your Affiliate URL to that book, because your website now has a direct link that has been approved at BooksOnline as an Affiliate connection. Amazing, isn’t it?

I hope you can see that BooksOnline is working very diligently to make your experience pleasant, beneficial, profitable, and absolutely secure. And we will never stop doing that!