I'd emailed Omar with a question about Ebay and the answer may answer a question you have.
My Question;
I would appreciate it if you could clear something up for me regards Ebay products.
I have added a sub-category for auctions and on the category page each product has a details and buy button.
If I hover my mouse over the buy button the link is to /click.php? followed by letters and numbers.
If I click on details the product window opens – If I then hover the mouse over either buy it now or add to watch list the link is to rover.ebay/... and I also see my default campaign and custom campaign id in the link address. If I hover over the buy button I see the link to /click.php?
Why does buy it now and add to watch list have my Ebay id’s in the link but the buy button link does not?
At least with Amazon you do see your Amazon Webservice Access key id in the address bar after the Amazon window opens, but you don’t see any affiliate id’s in the Ebay opened window.
Omar's Answer;
First thing first, ebay and amazon work differently. With ebay, after you click the link, you are redirected to an auction page that has an url without any campaign id or anything inside.
If you will click the BUY link through click.php or the rover.ebay.. link from Bid now, you will see that even for the direct link (rover.ebay...) that initially has a campaign id in the url, you get redirected to same auction page as you do when use the BUY button, that url not having any trace of aff id in urls. That is how ebay work.
The fact that buy link is "cloaked" but the bid now ones are not, is also because how ebay works. We cloak all affiliate links (some people considered that is better for various reasons, so we did it). We take the link, and through SS engine we hide it under click.php. We do that for all products from all plugins. However, the "bid now" and "add to watch" are inside the description of the item, they do not come as links to product, is just part of the html code that ebay return for a product description, and that is just parsed as it is. SS can not know what that code contain, just take all description and list it.
The fact that those links contain your campaign id, is a proof that SS uses right queries to grab products, and the link under click.php is same as the other ones.
