ViralURL Warning For Marketers
Posted by: John The GeekI’m a big fan of ViralURL. I use it for many of my marketing promotions and have been very happy with it. However, I’ve recently discovered a problem with it that could very well be affecting many marketers, including myself.
If you’ve been an Internet marketer for any length of time, you’re probably familiar with the $7 Script. The $7 Script makes it possible to promote a product by giving the affiliate promoting the product 100% commissions paid directly to their PayPal account. This is obviously very appealing to affiliates as they get paid immediately when a sale occurs rather than waiting for monthly commission payments. I promote a number of products that use the $7 Script and have had good success with it.
A customer of mine recently emailed me to say that he was trying to purchase a product I’d recommended, but when he clicked the PayPal order button, an error occurred and he wasn’t able to proceed further. After some back and forth with him we determined that the problem was only happening in Internet Explorer. It worked fine in Firefox when I tried it.
That particular promotion used a ViralURL redirection link, so on a hunch I tried accessing the site by using the actual affiliate URL instead of the ViralURL link. It worked fine in both Firefox and IE. So, we had isolated the problem to Internet Explorer through the ViralURL link. I reported the problem to the site owner and ViralURL.
To make a long story short, the site owner tried a change suggested by ViralURL and it didn’t resolve the problem. At this point it was a toss-up as to whether it was a problem with the site or with ViralURL. What bugged me about it was that it only happened in IE, not Firefox.
Last night, I found another site that uses the $7 Script and doesn’t work correctly in IE through a ViralURL link. When clicking the PayPal order button, there is no blatant error as in the first site, but the PayPal page comes up mostly blank with a Retry link instead of the login page that should appear. I’ve reported the problem to ViralURL and we’ll see where it goes from there.
The bottom line is: if you promote sites that use the $7 Script and you use ViralURL to cloak your links I recommend you use a different redirection method for those sites until ViralURL gets the problem resolved. Even if you test the site successfully on your machine, there’s no guarantee that it won’t fail on someone else’s machine. We ran into this while troubleshooting the problem. It was not a 100% failure rate. Sometimes it worked fine in IE6 and not IE7, sometimes neither one, and sometimes it worked fine on a different computer.
I’m going to identify all the links I have that use the $7 Script and use a different redirection method until ViralURL gets the problem fixed. I have no way of knowing how many people encountered the problem before the person kindly emailed me to tell me about it. I have to assume I’ve lost sales as a result.
Be careful out there!
5 Responses to “ViralURL Warning For Marketers”
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March 31st, 2008 at 6:35 am
Hi John,
The problem with the first site was a PHP error message of the $7 script installation, so the target=”_top” on the PayPal link didn’t help.
The $7 script site that I showed you worked fine in FF, IE 6 and IE 7 using a ViralURL cloaked link.
On the last $7 script site you encountered an PayPal internal error message that shows sometimes in IE as well as FF and also without using ViralURL. It’s an internal PayPal error that can be removed simply be refreshing your browser (in most cases).
It’s a known problem with PayPal that loading their pages in a frame (as all link cloakers do) can cause a problem. The solution is simple… if you own the site, add target=”_top” to your PayPal link or button. If you don’t own it, let the webmaster know so he can fix it.
Best regards,
Frank Bauer
Co-owner of ViralURL.com
March 31st, 2008 at 6:54 am
Hi John,
Colin Klinkert here. The problem is the issue that paypal doesnt work with any frames in IE (no link cloaker that makes a frame will work with them) and the option to fix this, which ALL site owners that use paypal should do (not just for viralurl, but for all the other cloakers out there) is to add a “_top” before the url in the html code.
This allows the frame to break and all should be fine then
March 31st, 2008 at 3:02 pm
Thanks for the feedback, Frank and Colin. I’ll accept that this problem is probably universal to any link cloaker that uses frames, although it still baffles me why Internet Explorer pukes but Firefox doesn’t. Frames are not rocket science and I would think this issue would extend well beyond PayPal for users of frames in IE.
In any case, I want to reiterate that I like, recommend and use ViralURL so I certainly want to be fair in presenting the facts. My warning still stands for any link cloaker that uses frames but this whole issue points up the importance of testing promotional links, as well as anything else we as marketers use in our businesses. That’s a topic for another day.
August 24th, 2008 at 6:25 am
I can’t open any Viralurl link, whether it be an appended version or the main URL. That goes for IE7 and Firefox.
????
Regards,
Brian
August 24th, 2008 at 2:46 pm
Hi, Brian,
What happens when you try to open a ViralURL link? Do you get an error message of some kind?
The only problem I’ve ever had with ViralURL links is the one mentioned. There’s no rocket science involved with them, so it’s very likely something configured incorrectly on your end.
John