Live data from Hacker News

Ad block shouldn't break your checkout

ilakovac.com

81–90 of 204 posts

Re: Ad block shouldn't break your checkout

#81
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I ask them if they use any site-modifying extensions. If they do, I ignore them completely, even if they wrote a long, detailed report. Note to self, don't use Photopea due to poor customer support. You would think the customer support would at least tell them to remove/disable the add-ons instead of ignoring them.

yeah, I also noted not to use photopea, their whole argument just comes across as arrogance/laziness. If you rely on GA loading before the rest of a page can actually work, then your site is bullshit. Enforcing a users data is given to GA is bullshit.

I expect they'll get over the loss of your business

Re: Ad block shouldn't break your checkout

#82
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're talking about a checkout. We're at the end of the sales funnel, where the monetary exchange is finalized, the deal is sealed, the value delivered. Breaking this based on an ad blocker just loses you money.

> Breaking this based on an ad blocker just loses you money. That's false. Similar thinking to how the MPAA said that downloading a MP3 is a lost sale. There was never a sale to begin with, the user is not interested in a purchase regardless of whether the pirated content is available. Here, the user will just go through the checkout again in a browser without ab-block or disable it. Why would they suddenly not need…

No, if I visit a site that is broken by my adblocker, or that uses recaptcha, I just never visit it again.

Re: Ad block shouldn't break your checkout

#83
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same thing happened to me with Domino's Canada. The call to place the order was returning a well-structured JSON error message (it didn't recognize the city I had entered, which was my suburb rather than my "post town") but the front-end wasn't telling me anything!

This is why I always call to order for takeout or delivery. I'd say that 75% of the time I experience some kind of technical issues with online ordering. Just talk to the human at the store.

I find calling is not just for take out unreasonably effective.

Somehow (well, we know the reasons) many websites and platforms require you to have a full inner model of its workings if you want to get things done. If you call, more often then not the person calling you does that work for you.

Re: Ad block shouldn't break your checkout

#84

I remember trying to order from a pizza place that talked to a third party delivery site, I hit "Order" and the browser didn't do anything. DevTools told me it tried to talk to the 3rd party using HTTP although the page was in HTTPS, and the browser blocked it (this was years ago when browsers started blocking HTTP content on HTTPS sites). Modifying the submit URL to https solved the problem. I found it pretty funny…

Reminds me of pizzatool. Today, probably nobody under 40 would have ever used it. https://instructabest.blogspot.com/2019/07/the-story-of-sun-...

[deleted]

Re: Ad block shouldn't break your checkout

#85

While we're at it, potential customers shouldn't need to identify pictures of traffic lights and buses to shop your store. If you're a web store , then you're in the business of selling things and advertising that you're selling them far and wide. The only place you might need a CAPTCHA is the account login page, and only then after there are multiple failed attempts from the same IP address. Other than that, get the…

Depends on if you have a bot/scraping problem or not. Though admittedly sitting behind something like Cloudflare and leveraging their reputation system rather than blithely embedding recaptcha into your page might be the way to go, but then you're married to Cloudflare. Pick your poison.

Re: Ad block shouldn't break your checkout

#86
post #6

TBH I don't see this as a TeeSpring problem - the code on their page guards against a realistic scenario (the GA script fails to load), but the "break" is caused by uBlock's changes. The article's title is correct: ad block shouldn't break checkout. Injecting a bogus value into a global breaks checkout, so ad block shouldn't do that.

Personally I think the path should guard against any change to unnecessary third party library function. Because third party script can be bugged and break your site in a funny way. Just like the story broken facebook login broke many site and apps. The api behaves funny, so everything broke all together because you explicitly rely on it without care.

Re: Ad block shouldn't break your checkout

#87
post #30

Your checkout shouldn't trigger ad block. Stop slavishly bowing to GA everywhere. I'm about to give you money. That's the only 'analytic' you should care about. I'm tired of being treated as little more than a data cow, always ready for milking. Just. Stop. To the person who ignores people who complain because their 'non-standard' browsers fail on their site, why do you have a site if you don't care about your users…

I worked for an e-commerce outfit for several years. Let me tell you they don't have massive budgets to use for R&D. Every last one of them uses off-the-shelf solutions, they have to, because they can't afford to pay a programmer to customize one for them. Their marketing teams work around the limitations of the software.

And they'd be absolutely blind without GA. There's no magic window into customer behavior. If you were actually in a physical store then they could look at you through the cameras. This way they can know if there are basic problems with the store.

With a website, they would have absolutely zero way to know what your experience of shopping there is like without a tool like GA. The only data they would have at all is sales numbers. The experience of shopping online would be immeasurably worse without it.

Re: Ad block shouldn't break your checkout

#89
post #30

Your checkout shouldn't trigger ad block. Stop slavishly bowing to GA everywhere. I'm about to give you money. That's the only 'analytic' you should care about. I'm tired of being treated as little more than a data cow, always ready for milking. Just. Stop. To the person who ignores people who complain because their 'non-standard' browsers fail on their site, why do you have a site if you don't care about your users…

What if I told you that the majority of people on a checkout page, don't actually check out, but abandon the cart instead?

"How would you even know that?" I hear you ask. Well, that's an interesting story....

Re: Ad block shouldn't break your checkout

#90

I remember trying to order from a pizza place that talked to a third party delivery site, I hit "Order" and the browser didn't do anything. DevTools told me it tried to talk to the 3rd party using HTTP although the page was in HTTPS, and the browser blocked it (this was years ago when browsers started blocking HTTP content on HTTPS sites). Modifying the submit URL to https solved the problem. I found it pretty funny…

I tried to order something from an online store, the “place order” button did nothing. The json response was nice enough to tell me to contact their bank responsible for the payment integration. A part of me wonder how things would turn out if I followed their instructions.
Post reply on HN