131–140 of 291 posts
Genuine question, is this not considered a DoS attack? Let's imagine I have my online stock linked to limited physical items/assets, ex tickets for a show, which will get reserved for a period of time. This will be preventing genuine clients from buying them.
The real problem with this is from the merchant side of things. This bot generates thousands of "Abandoned Carts" on one of our sites... thousands... We send cart reminders to Abandoned Carts after a few days, sometimes with a coupon offer to complete checkout. This bot is responsible for thousands of bounced emails each week, which impacts our metrics with Mandrill among other things. Maybe we shouldn't care, but it…
Do your users consent to contact before you send them reminders or coupons? If not, you've earned your bounce rate.
Violate CAN-SPAM Act and risk a $16,000 fine per instance? No legit business is going to do that.
Just ask Papa Johns how painful those fines/settlements can be[1].
[1] https://topclassactions.com/lawsuit-settlements/lawsuit-news...
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„Messing up your competitors A/B test“ is not unheard of as a tactic in highly competitive ecommerce settings.
Do software engineers actually implement that? That seems pretty immoral. I'd rather let them run the a/b test and steal whatever solution they end up with.
Not a great argument, but good enough to allow a developer to sleep at night.
The real problem with this is from the merchant side of things. This bot generates thousands of "Abandoned Carts" on one of our sites... thousands... We send cart reminders to Abandoned Carts after a few days, sometimes with a coupon offer to complete checkout. This bot is responsible for thousands of bounced emails each week, which impacts our metrics with Mandrill among other things. Maybe we shouldn't care, but it…
I personally find the 'email abandoned carts' behavior to be a dark pattern
Besides, the user is opting-in to receiving these emails. They don't have to provide an email address - so some are probably playing the game and seeing if they get a coupon or not.
As an aside - if the internet worked the way SV hipster brogrammers thought it should work, nobody would use it.
Yes, ads are crazy effective - you can ignore or block them, we don't care because enough people don't block them and are happy to click.
Yes, emails are crazy effective - you can ignore or opt-out or never opt-in, we don't care, you just cost us money if you're not engaged anyway so we'd rather you not be on our mailing list.
Look at The New York Times in 1921 [0]. Generally the stories are factual and to the point. The entire front page seems to be pure news. There's very little storytelling here, at most there are a few timelines of events.
Look at The New York Times today [1]. There's a bunch of factual and useful Coronavirus information but ~15% of the page is dedicated to "Opinion", the second article appears to be pure speculation, the third article is a bunch of storytime fluff around a little bit of news and the front page has a mix of actual news and opinion pieces being passed off as news.
When did this happen? Why? Did people lose interest in actual news? Is there less actual news to report?
Perhaps this is regional? Take for example the story about the San Quentin prison. NYTimes [2] has the same drawn out nonsense as this Google story while Aljazeera [3] adds a lot of background but sticks to factual reporting.
[0]: https://archive.org/details/NYTimes_jul16_31_1921
[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/30/us/san-quentin-prison-cor...
[3]: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/07/san-quentin-prison-se...
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Can’t you useragent sniff the bot and cut it off? If u want help coding this or advice happy to help (for free)
If you cut it off, you get penalized in Google Merchant Tools, and possibly have your product feed suppressed, which will dramatically impact your search visibility for both text and product searches. It can also impact your Google Ads if you link that with your product feed, and more. So, effectively, no you cannot cut this bot off. To make it worse, the bot doesn't always follow the same pattern. Sometimes slightly…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you cut it off, you get penalized in Google Merchant Tools, and possibly have your product feed suppressed, which will dramatically impact your search visibility for both text and product searches. It can also impact your Google Ads if you link that with your product feed, and more. So, effectively, no you cannot cut this bot off. To make it worse, the bot doesn't always follow the same pattern. Sometimes slightly…
I wonder why Google didn't include a "cleanup" routine that empties the shopping cart after the data is collected. It seems like it would be a trivial thing to do, unless I am missing something. I guess the answer is because it would not benefit them in any way.
Empty Abandoned Carts are useless anyway (for stats and other things - we track bounce rates in other ways), so that would be a large improvement from what is going on right now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe I haven’t done enough online shopping recently, but as far back as I remember this used to be the norm: enter postcode to calculate shipping, get precise final price without even adding to cart. Is it not the case anymore?
On many websites it still is. But recently many smaller independent stores use the Shopify platform where shipping is the penultimate step, before billing. You have to give address, email(!), phone number(!, mandatory), etc. before getting the price. I normally just use a fake email and number to get shipping price, and then do the actual checkout in incognito. Pretty sure if you do enter your real info and don't con…
The real problem with this is from the merchant side of things. This bot generates thousands of "Abandoned Carts" on one of our sites... thousands... We send cart reminders to Abandoned Carts after a few days, sometimes with a coupon offer to complete checkout. This bot is responsible for thousands of bounced emails each week, which impacts our metrics with Mandrill among other things. Maybe we shouldn't care, but it…
I consider this spammy behaviour, and mark the emails as such. I can only hope this discourages such practices in the future.
When and why did news cease being news and start being short stories and opinion? This entire article could have been cut down to the last few paragraphs and nothing of value would have been lost. Look at The New York Times in 1921 [0]. Generally the stories are factual and to the point. The entire front page seems to be pure news. There's very little storytelling here, at most there are a few timelines of events. Lo…