affiliate affiliates along buyer cart clear clicking commissions cookies deliberately doesn information interest link links necessary nor order overlay-style page perhaps post redirect referral related requested sales script seller sellers server service setting shopping site standard throw tips track user web websites

Quite by chance I've just seen this article saying that a law comes into force tomorrow obliging all websites to post clear information on any cookies and basically asking for explicit permission to do so, which should do wonders for sales...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/internet/9223930/EU-cookie-law- will-cost-businesses-10billion.html

The only cookies I have would be related to e-junkie for affiliate commissions I guess along with my web stats possibly. How on earth are we supposed to describe what the e-junkie cookies do? I guess this applies to all websites trading in the EU and not just EU based sellers.

Just looking at my own site now with Ghostery and it doesn't look like e-junkie is setting any cookies at all. Presumably the only cookies are set by links from affiliates before the visitor reaches my site in which case I'm wondering if I am even affected by this.

Perhaps I only need to throw in a privacy link saying I have no interest in tracking them or anything else.

We are not lawyers nor based in the EU, but from what we understand, this new regulation exempts cookies which are necessary to provide a service that the site user has deliberately requested, such as setting a cookie to keep track of a buyer's order details in providing a shopping cart service to them. This cookie is set by the seller's page (via our box.js cart script) for the seller's domain if they are using our standard overlay-style cart.

In the case of affiliate cookies, it's actually our US-based server that sets the referral cookie after clicking the affiliate link, and before we redirect the user to the seller's landing page, so sellers subject to this EU cookie directive should be unaffected in that case as well.

I found some analysis and tips here that you may find of interest:
http://www.compactlaw.co.uk/free-legal-articles/eu-cookie-law- regulations.html