Loading page before being forwarded to retailer

**mattoo** · 01-11-11

Hi

I would like to have a 'middleman' page on my site so when someone clicks an affiliate link, it opens a new page and says 'thank you for using our site, please wait whilst we direct you to the retailer' for example, then after say 5 secs the retailer page is loaded.

Can anyone kindly help me with this please?
Many thanks

**jonsp** · 01-11-11

Your bridge page needs to look something like this

Code:

<head>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="2;URL=/YourRedirectPage.php" /> 
<title>transferring you to merchant</title>
</head>
<body onload="setTimeout('document.location.href=\'/YourRedirectPage.php\'',2000)">
<p>transferring you....</p>
</body>

Change 2 to 5 if you like. if you want to see it working here's an example url on one of my sites
Samsung Galaxy S2 Deals Compared | Compare the Best Galaxy S2 Deals Available Today
Click any of the orange buttons

**mattoo** · 01-11-11

Many thanks for your reply.

So how do I get the page to load the url that has been clicked? At the moment, none of my affiliate urls are masked. Does the 'YourRedirectPage.php' automatically change to the url of the retailer page being loaded? Do I need to name this bridge page anything in particular?

Sorry for all the questions, I am grateful for your help.

Thanks

**D-Mac** · 02-11-11

A couple of options:

1. Store the affiliate links in a database, with a unique ID for each. Send users to the 'bridge' page via a URL like this:
..../bridge.php?id=127

on bridge.php 'get' the ID, then retrieve the affiliate link from the database, and use that as your redirect URL as described above.

2. Don't bother with a database. Just do: .../bridge.php?afflink=http://affiliatnetwork.com/link_blahdy_blah/

Then on your bridge.php:

$afflink = $_GET['afflink'];

Substitute YourRedirectPage.php (in the above example) with $afflink (just make sure you get the right quotes in the right places)

First option is tidier, second option is quicker to implement.

Personally I wouldn't bother with the bridge page at all, as I think they slow the whole buying process down too much, annoy the customer, and do very little for branding your site anyway. Just my 2p :-)