Is there something a site can do to incorporate third party cookies

Question

I work for an e-commerce site. Part of what we do is to offer customized items to some clients. Recently some non-technical management promised that we could incorporate our check-out process into one such client's website. The only way we've figured out how to do this is by using an iframe (I know, I don't like it either). The issue is that most customers of this site are unable to check out because we use cookies to determine which custom items to display. Browsers are recognizing our cookies as third party and almost everybody has third party cookies turned off, as they should. I'm going to be shocked if the answer is yes, but is there any workaround for this? ie can the site hosting our iframe somehow supply the necessary cookie?

Answer 1

Try an invisible, interstitial page.

Essentially the hosting site would issue a redirect to a site within your domain, which is then free to set cookies (because at this point is is actually the first party). Then your site immediately redirects back to the hosting site. At this point your newly-created cookies will be invisible to the hosting site but visible to your iFramed page henceforth.

Unfortunately the hosting site will have to do this every time a cookie is to be updated but the double-redirect can happen so quickly they'll hardly notice. Hopefully your system only needs the cookies to be set once.

Answer 2

Instead of using a cookie, pass the information in the each url request as name/value pairs.

It is a bit of a pain to add the name/value to every url...I know...oh well...it will work.