Build A Niche Store

The Build A Niche Store Cookie Unraveled

Posted by admin

There seems to be a ton of questions on the boards about cookies for some reason.

Here it is.

There are two cookies when it comes to BANS sites. One you don’t need to care about so much, one you do.

The first cookie is YOUR cookie. When a visitor hits YOUR site, BANS sets a PHP session cookie. If you run google analytics, you will see those show up as well.

The only reason most people care about this cookie is that it requires them to have a privacy policy according to the eBay TOS.

The second cookie is the most important cookie and it is the cookie that eBay sets. When someone clicks on an auction link from your site there is a huge url. In that url is your campaign id. EBay reads that campaign id and sets a cookie on the visitors machine. This cookie associates your campaign with that visitor. Again, YOU did not set this cookie. When someone clicks the link and is sent to eBay, eBay sets the cookie on their site populating it with your encrypted campaign id.

So to recap.

You set one cookie, mainly for PHP session info.

Visitor clicks a auction link. eBay sets their own eBay cookie that associates your campaign id with that visitor.

That visitor buys something within 7 days, eBay knows the lead came from your campaign and gives you credit.

If you run firefox and clear all your cookies you can see all this take place. simply visit your site and view the cookie, then click on an auction and view your cookies. You should have 3 trees. One is your site, one is main.ebayrtm.com and the other is ebayrtm.com. I’m pretty sure it’s the ebayrtm.com that contains the info need to attach the visitor to your campaign.

Hope that helps.

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