Ad block shouldn't break your checkout • Hacker News Board

Re: Ad block shouldn't break your checkout

#191

Post by shermozle » Wed, May 19, 2021, 2:25 AM UTC

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.

Chrome store says 10 million+ users (I expect it's vastly higher than that) 24,000 reviews. Firefox says 5 million users and 12,000 reviews.

Ignore it at your peril. If you want to make sales, you need to test the ways your prospective customers want to buy.

Re: Ad block shouldn't break your checkout

#192

Post by vinceguidry » Wed, May 19, 2021, 4:32 AM UTC

Beldin wrote: post #182

vinceguidry wrote: post #87

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…

No. The standard web analytics tools of the late 90s basically parsed the http log. Even those will give you info equivalent to "looking through cameras". You might want GA, you might even need it, but you're absolutely not blind without it unless you choose to be so.

Good luck training your fresh-out-of-college marketing team on your homespun http log analytics tool. Even if you succeed, your CFO will convince your CEO to move to GA eventually. Ask me how I know.

Re: Ad block shouldn't break your checkout

#193

Post by s_fischer » Wed, May 19, 2021, 5:06 AM UTC

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.

I hate to be the one to break this to you but GA usually isn't as invasive as you seem to think. It's mainly tracking things like time on a page, links clicked, bounce rates, etc.

It's not deep scanning your hard drive to try and figure out your SSN or medical history like some people think.

Re: Ad block shouldn't break your checkout

#194

Post by IvanK_net » Wed, May 19, 2021, 5:14 AM UTC

ohyeshedid wrote: post #172

IvanK_net wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An update: almost nobody pays for Photopea, and all my reports are from users who use it for free. I fixed over 3000 issues so far, some took minutes, others took weeks: https://github.com/photopea/photopea/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%... A "popular" issue is, that people use an extension, which renames files saved by Photopea to .TXT. It is reported several times a week and every time, I tell people to disable an extensi…

How does having GA integrated into your sales flow prevent these situations from happening?

What is GA? I do not have any sales.

Re: Ad block shouldn't break your checkout

#195

Post by veeti » Wed, May 19, 2021, 6:15 AM UTC

matheusmoreira wrote: post #125

rchaud wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> that's on Ublock Origin, which replaces the GA object with a dummy There's absolutely nothing wrong with this. The blocker does it because just deleting the object would let obnoxious websites to detect its presence and punish users for it. The better question is why their checkout completely breaks because of this. Their reliance on Google spyware is 100% on them and they are losing sales because of it.

It's not a very good dummy then as it's trivial to detect. PoC already exists in TFA.

Re: Ad block shouldn't break your checkout

#196

Post by ryandrake » Wed, May 19, 2021, 6:20 AM UTC

ignoramous wrote: post #64

Navarr wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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 think they could go one step further and may be try...catch (sandbox) all access to third-party services that aren't critical. User-agents, which browsers are, expectedly do put a lot of control in the hands of the end-users. Such breakages should be factored in and worked around (p…

Exactly. A browser's job as the user's agent is to do what the user wants it to do. It's not an ABI. If an end-user's browser is configured to do something you, as a developer, don't want or expect, and that breakage causes the loss of a sale, it's kind of on you: Either take a principled stand about "what browsers should be doing" and accept the lost sale, or try/catch around non-critical code to make your site more robust to the user's configuration choices.

Re: Ad block shouldn't break your checkout

#197

Post by throwaddzuzxd » Wed, May 19, 2021, 8:19 AM UTC

sofixa wrote: post #174

LaGrange wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yeah, but who are you? I am none of your business.

You, personally, are not. You, one of a cohort, kind of are. If i run an e-commerce site, and see the vast majority of my users, but the minority of those that buy stuff, are on mobile and from India, maybe i need to optimise my site for mobile and lower-speed connections? Maybe something is wrong with my payment for specific currencies? If i run a blog, ans the majority of my viewers come from France, maybe it's tim…

And for all of that, you need GA because...?

Re: Ad block shouldn't break your checkout

#198

Post by sofixa » Wed, May 19, 2021, 12:10 PM UTC

throwaddzuzxd wrote: post #197

sofixa wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You, personally, are not. You, one of a cohort, kind of are. If i run an e-commerce site, and see the vast majority of my users, but the minority of those that buy stuff, are on mobile and from India, maybe i need to optimise my site for mobile and lower-speed connections? Maybe something is wrong with my payment for specific currencies? If i run a blog, ans the majority of my viewers come from France, maybe it's tim…

And for all of that, you need GA because...?

Because it's easy and marketing people can work with it. Access logs don't have all the information ( e.g. viewport) and are cumbersome to parse.

Re: Ad block shouldn't break your checkout

#199

Post by sofixa » Wed, May 19, 2021, 12:12 PM UTC

pseudalopex wrote: post #186

sofixa wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You, personally, are not. You, one of a cohort, kind of are. If i run an e-commerce site, and see the vast majority of my users, but the minority of those that buy stuff, are on mobile and from India, maybe i need to optimise my site for mobile and lower-speed connections? Maybe something is wrong with my payment for specific currencies? If i run a blog, ans the majority of my viewers come from France, maybe it's tim…

You can see those things with just server logs.

No, you can't. There's no way to get viewport from server logs, and presenting them a form digestible by marketing people isn't easy.

Re: Ad block shouldn't break your checkout

#200

Post by robben1234 » Wed, May 19, 2021, 1:49 PM UTC

matheusmoreira wrote: post #125

rchaud wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> that's on Ublock Origin, which replaces the GA object with a dummy There's absolutely nothing wrong with this. The blocker does it because just deleting the object would let obnoxious websites to detect its presence and punish users for it. The better question is why their checkout completely breaks because of this. Their reliance on Google spyware is 100% on them and they are losing sales because of it.

Modifying client code (especially with an addon you do not control) and then complaining to the original code owner when functionality stop working is wrong.

Analytics and ads are annoying, I get it. However if you use an automated script to clear them out, be aware that some things might brake.

If Ublock Origin devs think they need to replace GA with a dummy to stop tracking they should've put a copy of the original interface with empty functions into it so the flow doesn't throw exceptions when the app tries to use it thinking everything's fine. Those scripts are publicly available and aren't a secret.