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Question

Colon breaks links

  • January 20, 2026
  • 3 replies
  • 30 views

JessFosnough
Expert Problem Solver IV
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Our website allows customers to sort categories by lowest to highest price, highest to lowest price, name (alphabetical) and newest to oldest. When I sort a category newest to oldest, the link looks like this:

https://www.unitednow.com/art/papers-boards/drawing-paper/drawing-sketch-pads?order=createddate:desc

When I send this link through Klaviyo, it breaks – the colon is changed to %3A so the link looks like this:

https://www.unitednow.com/art/papers-boards/drawing-paper/drawing-sketch-pads?order=createddate%3Adesc

(before UTM parameters are added). If I remove :desc  the link works, but the sort order defaults to ascending instead of descending (desc), which we don’t want. (This also happens when sorting by price, so sorting by highest to lowest does not work when sent through Klaviyo.) I’ve read that turning off website tracking can fix this, but we don’t want to do that either – we use the tracking for abandoned cart/checkout. Any ideas on how I can get this to work? We use NetSuite/Suite Commerce Standard, and don’t have the ability to make a lot of coding changes on our back end.

3 replies

cadence
Expert Problem Solver III
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  • Expert Problem Solver III
  • January 21, 2026

@JessFosnough, I believe you’d have to turn off Klaviyo “Email to Website tracking” (https://help.klaviyo.com/hc/en-us/articles/115005076767)  in order to prevent Klaviyo from encoding the URL. 

There might be a way to update your site so that it correctly decodes the URL parameter, converting “%3A” back to a “:”. But, if there’s not a clear way to do that, I’d try to find a way to avoid needing the colon in the link in the first place.

Can you set up another URL in SuiteCommerce that redirects to this URL with the proper query parameters? Something like “https://www.unitednow.com/landing-page/recently-created-sketch-pads”?  Another option here might be a URL shortener (e.g. bit.ly) that you use instead. Klaviyo would add the relevant tracking params to that link and then that would redirect to your final destination URL: https://www.unitednow.com/art/papers-boards/drawing-paper/drawing-sketch-pads?order=createddate:desc

Hope this helps!

Cadence / Book a demo


Byrne C
Community Manager
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  • Community Manager
  • January 21, 2026

Hi ​@JessFosnough,

Thanks for explaining the issue you’re facing. You have a couple options here, and I’ll admit that neither of them are perfect, but I’m more than happy to share them:

  1. Have your developer team work on your website, so it can read URLs with encoding. You mentioned that you have limited flexibility with your website, but if you do find a way to make this happen, that would be the best option.
  2. Remove click tracking manually from essential links. In an HTML block, structure your link like this: <a clicktracking=off href="http://example.com">link text</a>​​​​​​Note that this will only work in an HTML block, so you can’t add this into an image/button block, though you can manually create images and buttons in HTML blocks. I recognize how important click tracking is, and you probably don’t want to get rid of it entirely, but you do have this option in situations when ensuring that people click a specific link comes before tracking their clicks.

Happy to reach out to our product team and ask if we can explore ways to track clicks without encoding, because I definitely see how this would be useful, though!​


JessFosnough
Expert Problem Solver IV
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  • Author
  • Expert Problem Solver IV
  • January 23, 2026

Thanks so much for your responses, ​@Byrne C and ​@cadence!
I’m going to do some testing with both of your ideas and see if I can get anything to work.