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Ad block shouldn't break your checkout

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Re: Ad block shouldn't break your checkout

#101

Post by detaro »

waynesonfire wrote: post #69
barrkel wrote: 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…

The sales people are always on about how easily people "abandon carts" due to small friction. Lots of things people buy they a) don't need that urgently or b) can buy somewhere else. Some fan shirt off TeeSpring is very strongly in the "not urgently needed" category, your powerwasher example might very well be too and can be bought from tons of places.

Re: Ad block shouldn't break your checkout

#102

Post by shadowgovt »

dawnerd wrote: post #96
rchaud wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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....

Plenty of ways to get that data without invasive tracking like GA.

Is the invasive part that the data is going to GA or that the failure-to-close-sale is explicitly being logged at all?

Re: Ad block shouldn't break your checkout

#103

Post by LaGrange »

sofixa wrote: post #65
wai1234 wrote: 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'm about to give you money. That's the only 'analytic' you should care about Yeah, but who are you? Are you an impulse buyer? Returning? Did you spend an hour on the product page? Did you jump between 20 different product pages? You can't deny that this kind of analytics can be very useful for user conversion and website design. And the site in question tries to do the proper thing, checking if GA works before try…

> Yeah, but who are you?

I am none of your business.

Re: Ad block shouldn't break your checkout

#104

Post by shadowgovt »

rchaud wrote: post #91
ookware wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's great, but all of that tracking is pointless if I can't actually complete the sale

That's not on TeeSpring, that's on Ublock Origin, which replaces the GA object with a dummy. The user is running code on their local machine that breaks his/her own ability to complete the sale.

And practically speaking, the back-stop is that if uBlock Origin causes too many high-profile websites to break, it'll get a reputation for degrading user experience and fewer users will install it.

When two independently-owned systems on the web break each other, "who needs to fix their stuff" is a question more of social networks and business politics than technology. TeeSpring's "fix" could be to pop a banner that says "WARNING: uBlock Origin breaks this site and we can't test for that."

Re: Ad block shouldn't break your checkout

#105

Post by LaGrange »

vinceguidry wrote: post #87
wai1234 wrote: 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 yo…

> And they'd be absolutely blind without GA.

Good.

> If you were actually in a physical store then they could look at you through the cameras.

That's a gross idea to have.

Re: Ad block shouldn't break your checkout

#106

Post by jonpurdy »

throwawayboise wrote: post #50
lainga wrote: 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've found that half the time whatever site I'm trying to order with doesn't work, either due to Safari, adblock, or whatever. Sometimes doing it in Chrome helps, but not always. Even if it works, I need to create an account and set up another email aliases for the site (since every site gets it's own alias).

I've learned to just call orders in these days.

Re: Ad block shouldn't break your checkout

#107

Post by shadowgovt »

jerf wrote: post #33

My local energy company has a website where you can register an account to pay remotely with them. I have uMatrix on and it was blocking some third party scripts. It managed to get my account into some sort of "half-created" state. It is impossible to log in, impossible to reset the password, and impossible to create a new account with my (physical!) address because "an account already exists for that address". I ult…

That's a bad bug on their end. It implies that if a user's user-agent crashes (or they kick the power plug out of the wall at the wrong time), they can get into this state.

As a general principle, it should be impossible for a client to "half-configure" an account; the Internet isn't designed to be reliable enough to support guarantees that all the relevant messages get sent and received.

Re: Ad block shouldn't break your checkout

#108

Post by adrr »

wai1234 wrote: 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’ve seen adblocks take out anti-fraud libraries, localization libraries, accessibility libraries. They target things they shouldn’t.

Re: Ad block shouldn't break your checkout

#109

Post by LeifCarrotson »

Navarr wrote: post #61
helsinkiandrew wrote: post #44

Hang on: The Tee Spring code checks if GA is there and works without it, the website breaks because Ad block replaces GA with a fake object that doesn't have the same API. Perhaps some companies have the resources to check if their websites run with different ad blockers, but expecting websites to work when plugins are replacing and breaking running code is a big ask.

Yeah this is very clearly on the ad-blocker. I think TeeSpring has the right idea - they're checking that GA is loaded, if it is, then do stuff with it, if it's not, then don't. I don't understand how a website can and should be expected to adapt to a browser plugin changing the APIs they depend on out from underneath them.

The ad blocker is probably trying to do the right thing for their users, to. Too many websites check that GA is loaded, if it is, then do stuff with it, if it's not, then redirect to a "Please disable your ad-blocker" page.

Re: Ad block shouldn't break your checkout

#110

Post by NoGravitas »

IMO, this points out the inherent and unresolveable contradiction between browsers being a user-agent, and browsers being a precisely-specified execution environment for arbitrary applications. A browser that is built to operate in the interests of its user will not run code that is harmful to them, whether that's code to track them, code to mine bitcoin, or code to display advertisements. On the other hand, a browser that is compliant with the (largely advertising-company-defined) web platform standard will do all these things, and can't permit any user-agent features or extension mechanisms that would interfere with them. The web platform standard as we know it essentially specifies that the browser belongs to the website operator (within some sandboxing guarantees), not to the browser user. On the whole, I prefer that software I run on my computer belong to me; this makes using the web a necessary evil at best.
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