[September 6th, 2001]

See Also   Why You Need an Add URL Page   A Tale Of Two Sites   Don't Duplicate...Differentiate!   The Continuing Battle Against Online Fraud   Taking Care of the Pennies   How To Recession-Proof Your Business   Your Fulfillment Choices   The Silent Thief - How to Get Rid of TopText   A Checklist for Accepting Credit Cards Online   Five Questions That Will Help YOU Succeed Online   Back To "E" Basics   Beyond SET: Enhanced Security for Online Transactions   Just How Serious is Online Fraud?   Your Direct Channel to Customer Service   Online Customer Service: Best (and Worst) Practices   How to Survive the Dot.Com Shakeout   Step-by-Step to Your Own Profitable Web Business   Where Do Average People Find Business Success?   What's REALLY Required To Start An Online Home Business?   CRM in SmallBiz: Disappointing Misconceptions

Although building an e-commerce Web site can be a major undertaking, seasoned e-tailers will quickly tell you that in reality building your Web store is the easy part and that the real difficult piece is attracting visitors in to your Web store and then encouraging them to make a purchase. And not only can getting traffic into your Web store be a time-consuming exercise, it can also prove to be very expensive for those e-tailers who choose to pay for their advertising.

So what if I was to tell you that right now, while you are reading this article, someone is in your Web store stealing your visitors? Sound unreal? Don't believe it? Well, chances are that it is 100% true!

Unless you've been living on planet Mars for the last couple of weeks, you are bound to have heard of a new family of software which has been christened "scumware" or "thiefware". The basic function of this software is to replace links you have inserted in your site with links that a third party has paid the "thiefware" vendor to place for them. So, for example, if someone purchases the keyword "DVD" from the "thiefware" vendor and you have a link in your Web store with this keyword, instead of your visitor being transferred to the DVD section of your Web store they will instead be transferred to the Web site of the company who has purchased the keyword.

I guess the most obvious question to ask is why would people install "thiefware" on their computers in the first place? The fact is that most people don't know they have it installed: they simply download a useful piece of software that has the "thiefware" hidden with in it. For example, currently the most widespread piece of "thiefware" is a program from eZula called TopText, which is unwittingly installed along with the new KaZaa system, an MP3-sharing program that has replaced the popular Napster service.

So how widespread is "thiefware"? It's hard to get an accurate figure, but here are two statistics that will give you some idea of the extent of "thiefware" penetration: nearly ten million copies of KaZaa have been downloaded from CNET's download.com alone; and based on the few days data I have available from the Sell It! Web site, around 8% of my visitors currently have TopText installed on their computers.

Unfortunately, TopText is not the only threat. Two new pieces of "thiefware" have recently appeared, Surf+ EasyLinks and Gator. EasyLinks works in a similar manner to TopText while Gator is a variation on the theme - instead of replacing links on your Web site it replaces banner ads.

If you want to find out if you have inadvertently installed any "thiefware" on your Web site, then pay a visit to the ScumWare.com site. They have incorporated a detector in to their home page that will immediately tell you whether or not you have TopText or Surf+ installed.

Of course, from an e-tailers perspective the most important thing is to remove the "thiefware" links from your Web store to prevent your valuable traffic being siphoned off. Unfortunately, unlike Microsoft's controversial Smart Tags scheme, there is no way you can disable "thiefware" by modifying your META tags. However, there are a couple of free tools available that can help you remove "thiefware" links. Unfortunately, neither of these tools is effective against Gator, and they both work by employing a feature that the "thiefware" vendors might easily disable in future releases of their software.

For now, these tools work by automatically triggering a refresh of your Web pages just after they have been loaded in to your visitor's browser. This refresh causes any "thiefware" links to be removed.

SearchKing have made available two free fixes that are effective against both TopText and EasyLinks. The simplest method is to insert a small piece of JavaScript in to each of your Web pages. This code runs a small program on the SearchKing server that causes your pages to automatically refresh. The downside of this method is that if the SearchKing server becomes overloaded it will either slow down your Web pages or will not remove the "thiefware" links, depending on where you place the script in your pages. To overcome this limitation, SearckKing have also made available a simple Perl script that you can download and install on your own server.

Another solution is available from ThiefWare.com. They provide a simple form that produces a piece JavaScript code, which you can cut and paste in to your own Web pages

Sidebar
Your heart might be sinking at the thought of having to modify all your Web pages. However, I use a great little utility from Funduc Software called Search and Replace, which enabled me to update the 1000+ pages on the Sell It! site in less than a minute! It's a shareware program and so you can download a trial version free. Registration only costs $25 and is highly recommended - Search and Replace is one of the most useful tools I have in my Webmaster toolkit.

Resources
The battle against "thiefware" is only just beginning and it is vital that you keep yourself up to date with the latest developments. These two Web sites carry all the latest news:

ScumWare.com
ThiefWare.com