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Issues when using URL Masking and Working with Frames
URL Masking or Forwarding is a technique to enable you to forward visitors to a website address (such as your online shop) but to keep your domain name in the address bar. It is usually
provided by alot of domain registrars. It means you don't have to transfer a domain name and instead can just point it at another website. The technique is achieved by using frames.
However this method causes a lot of problems with ecommerce sites and most importantly it seriously effects your search engine rankings.
ekmPowershop will try initially to use a Cookie to track a customers shopping cart, however if a customer has Cookies disabled ekmPowershop will
change and use a querystring method to track the cart, giving you urls which look like www.yourdomain.co.uk/index.asp?uid=45875484745 (a common sight
on a lot of ecommerce sites).
When you create a Cookie it is created (for security reasons) on a domain name, so for example if you were on the website page www.mysite.co.uk/home.asp
and this page created a cookie it could only ever be accessed by the www.mysite.co.uk domain name. If you were using URL Masking or Frames your customers web
address might be different from www.mysite.co.uk and so your customers would be unable to access the Cookie.
In the case for a ekmPowershop store for example
your store address might be www.ekmpowershop.com/ekmps/shops/username/index.asp (so the cookies are created for ekmpowershop.com) yet your using URL Masking so
your web address for your customers is www.yourshop.co.uk. Because of this your customer will not be able to access the Cookie and so the querystring method is employed.
The querystring method works by maintaining the querystring value of uid=???????? (Where ??????? is a unique number used to identify the customer). As long as this value is
passed from page to page the carts contents will be maintained. ekmPowershop ensures that all links within your online shop automatically include the uid= querystring, however
external links outside of our control will not have this value.
The problem when using URL Masking and Frames however is that if the main page (where the ekmpowershop cart is
located) is refresh or reloaded the uid= querystring will be lost, and therefore so will the customers shopping cart. Also URL Masking and Frames means your site will not be
correctly indexed by the search engines which obviously is a massive problem.
The only real way around this problem is not to use URL Masking or Frames, if you wish to use a
domain name we recommend that you transfer it in, ensuring that your shops website address is the website address you want your customers to use.
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