Live data from Hacker News

Ad block shouldn't break your checkout

ilakovac.com

131–140 of 204 posts

Re: Ad block shouldn't break your checkout

#131
post #73

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.

But you don't even need to check, you just don't blow up and still check out if it doesn't work? Put it this way, forget adblock, if the GA call fails, it should still check out. (Assuming the problem doesn't affect other stuff too, like internet down or whatever.)

I think the problem is that with the code-as-written, if the GA call fails, the relevant `window` field won't be populated, which the code is detecting.

Given the hyper-malleable nature of JavaScript in an HTML page in a user-agent owned by the end user, at some point the developer has to draw a line in the sand and say "This category of failure modes is not checked," because it's mathematically impossible to check all possible failure modes in that configuration. "An extension is intentionally faking an object in the `window` context" just happens to be on the other side of the "don't check" line for this application, because it's extremely unlikely (and, one could argue, user-self-inflicted).

Re: Ad block shouldn't break your checkout

#132
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.

The killer for me is Indian places that only offer their mildest spiciness when you order online, but ask you for a spiciness level when you order on the phone. Absolutely brutal.

Re: Ad block shouldn't break your checkout

#133
Adblock doesn't break sites. If your site doesn't work with adblock, that means your site is broken.

27% of American internet users use adblock in some form. Better go check right now that you're not losing 27% of sales to it.

Re: Ad block shouldn't break your checkout

#134
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

More and more businesses are adding prerecorded responses and menus to their regular line. It’s a matter of time until we completely automate delivery calls too, I guess.

Then I'll either go there less and just order in person, or not at all.

The whole reason I call is E.G. Round Table Pizza had a perfectly good "Web 1.0" website. Instead of updating some CSS rules to make it render better on mobile they seem to have outsourced to a third party and now everything performs worse and has it's own clunky hell. So instead of using a shit re-design on a website I just call on the phone.

Re: Ad block shouldn't break your checkout

#135

I am an author of a photo editor https://www.Photopea.com . Whenever someone reports a bug to me, 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. Web authors make websites for standard web browsers. I do not consider a browser with site-modifying extensions to be a standard web browser, and it is not my job to test my website with…

div id="ad" but not containing an actual ad, seems like a pretty obvious unintentional overlap, and one that's not going to go away. How difficult would it be for you to change the div name to not coincide with the characters most closely involved with one of the most contentious technologies around? And never have to deal with that potential conflict again? > What kind of a mental process should a brain perform to c…

I've run into similar things with the word ad, banner etc but they don't have to be standalone to triggers some filters, adblock is fairly dumb in that sense.

Re: Ad block shouldn't break your checkout

#136
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…

No excuse for breaking the website with the tracking though. NULL is a valid field in databases for good reason.

Re: Ad block shouldn't break your checkout

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Don't try and talk sense into the commenters here. Their use case is the only one that matters, and they lack the imagination to think that other people have different budgets, time, or expertise than them.

There are people here who believe Google Analytics is the absolute devil, the reality is much more benign.

OP saying that "I am not a data cow" is just missing the point. GA is logging when you visit the website, some interactions like clicking a link, and generally not much more than that. It is not indexing your hard drive or downloading your photos.

Re: Ad block shouldn't break your checkout

#138
post #108
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.

Load these things on the main website too, so it can be fixed on the first page, not on the checkout page. Some of us train the adblockers (at least locally) by whitelisting exceptions to the default BLOCK EVERYTHING rule / the current rules provided by the shared lists.

Re: Ad block shouldn't break your checkout

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't try and talk sense into the commenters here. Their use case is the only one that matters, and they lack the imagination to think that other people have different budgets, time, or expertise than them.

There are people here who believe Google Analytics is the absolute devil, the reality is much more benign. OP saying that "I am not a data cow" is just missing the point. GA is logging when you visit the website, some interactions like clicking a link, and generally not much more than that. It is not indexing your hard drive or downloading your photos.

Go somewhere in person and there's probably orders of magnitude more data being collected on your activities.

Re: Ad block shouldn't break your checkout

#140
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> this kind of analytics can be very useful for user conversion and website design Excuse my ignorance on web development, but why? How?

Well done analytics can give the tracker a lot of information about if the user got there from marketting or other outreach, what they did on the site, and if they took some action that's important to the site operator (buying something, creating an account, posting, logging in, whatever), and what page was the last thing they did before they left.

If you're selling stuff, and you notice a lot of people going partway through your checkout process and leaving, it might be a sign that something in the process isn't user friendly and improvement could benefit you. Especially if the behavior has changed recently.

You might see that people come in from a marketting link where you thought they'd like to buy A, but they rarely buy A, and if they do buy something, they buy B; maybe it would make sense to use that link to go to the sales page for B instead, etc.

You could even notice that people who don't run your javascript analytics still add things to the cart, and start the checkout, but never finish, and take that as something to investigate.

This isn't a defense of Google Analytics in specific, or javascript analytics in general, this could be done serverside with just a cookie to corellate across multiple visits, or a session cookie within the same visit, or instrumenting all the links and correlating that way. Javascript could be used to remove tracking tags for copying links, but have it when clicked; great if it works, not the end of the world if it doesn't.

Post reply on HN