I read earlier on today about the new redesign at Perfume.com, and went to have a look, as I know they are considered a leader in eCommerce design, and spend a lot of time refining the experience of people on their site to increase conversions.

But when I went there, I found a spammy looking page full of ads etc http://search.perfume.com/ Have they been hacked? What is going on!

But a quick search of the web and the blogosphere turned up nothing obvious. Strange - if there has been a high profile hacking you can usually find something about it somewhere. So I dug a little more and turned up this gem on an affiliate marketing forum.

From David at Perfume.com in April 2007: "We only sell perfume in the US. Visitors from foreign countries (except Canada, which is where I am located) receive a landing page with links to merchants who may sell in those countries. This is done by IP identification technology, which is not always perfect. In addition, we identify users from some countries that have a high level of fraudulent credit card orders and send visitors from these countries to the FBI internet fraud site homepage. An example of one of these countries is... Nigeria. So in fact, all is in order as long as our affiliates send us traffic from the US."

Well... extraordinary.

As someone who has worked with affiliates before I can quite understand that some of them removed all links to the programme from their pages. And as someone who has logged on to a regional site before to order in that country for a present to be sent direct to someone who lives in that country, this is just amazing. I suppose it must work for them financially, but I'm still flabbergasted.

I did manage to get into their site and see the new design, but the fact that they are controlling access to their pages using IP delivery (a.k.a. cloaking) is much more interesting to me as an SEO than the fact they have made green "Add to Cart" buttons. Lucky that Google.co.uk is located in the US eh?