[wai1234]

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 accessing it? Ego much?

[sofixa]

> 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 trying to do stuff with it, so it wouldn't just fail if GA was blocked by the user.

[mitchdoogle]

I always try to just these things based on physical analogies. The clear analog for visiting an ecommerce store is walking into a physical store with a shopping cart. Maybe the physical store has cameras or some other way they track people. In any case they probably aren't watching every single customer to determine which aisles they walk down, if they pick up an item without putting it in their cart, etc. Let's say they are doing that though, for the sake of analogy. It's strange to me that people are ok with that, but let's move on..

Now, since an adblocker doesn't change anything anywhere except on the end user's computer, the analog should be something on the customer's person, or some part of their behavior. So let's say the customer tries to avoid identification by wearing a hat, and they purposely grab every item and put it back on the shelf to mess with the data about their shopping habits.

Do you think it makes sense for the cashier to refuse to checkout anyone who is wearing a hat? Or if they spotted someone who picked a few things up without putting them in their cart?

Because I sure don't.

[ookware]

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

[rchaud]

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.

[matheusmoreira]

> 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.

[robben1234]

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.

[veeti]

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

[KeepFlying]

That's on the site for requiring tracking to be successful in order to take my money.

They shouldn't require tracking to succeed in order for me to buy the product. If they want tracking, sure. But be resistant to it erroring out. Don't let errors in 3rd party tools prevent your user from getting their core goals completed.

The same goes for client apps. Don't crash the app if it fails to log to a file. Don't crash the app if it can't sync your cache. Etc, etc. Don't let these unnecessary conveniences get in the users way.

[JulianMorrison]

If your site put a selfish arrogant tracker in the way of completing the order... then you lost the sale. And the customer, who won't be coming back. I don't give a good god-damn about how it's "part of the site". It's not part of the transaction, and you put it there, and it broke things.

[shadowgovt]

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."

[inetknght]

> TeeSpring's "fix" could be to pop a banner that says "WARNING: uBlock Origin breaks this site and we can't test for that."

That'd be great. Then I, as a user of uBlock Origin, can nope-out of the site before wasting too much of my time and the site's resources.

[OldTimeCoffee]

That's not how it ends up working, though. People just share screenshots or tell friends of the broken website and people stop using the website not uBO.

And there are sites that will throw up a banner that says 'Adblockers might break this, if you have problems disable your Adblocker and try again' which is pretty effective. Funny enough, in my experience, sites with that banner tend to work with uBO enabled (probably because they're testing it).

[FalconSensei]

The checkout shouldn't rely on GA.

Tracking should rely on the tracking service, not the checkout process

[LaGrange]

> Yeah, but who are you?

I am none of your business.

[sofixa]

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 time i start writing localised content in French?

You get the gist.

[pseudalopex]

You can see those things with just server logs.

[sofixa]

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.

[throwaddzuzxd]

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

[sofixa]

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.

[LaGrange]

I get the gist, you believe you’re so bad at running a shop and/or writing you can’t survive without creeping on people.

Also, look at both of your examples. They’re bad. They’re both best replied to with that diagram of holes on a WW2 airplane.

[jfengel]

If you're trying to buy from me, who you are is literally my business.

[KeepFlying]

What I buy from you is your business. The information I give you to complete my transaction is your business.

Who I am is not.

You don't need to know if I have kids, have a disease, my age, my race, my gender. You don't need to know anything. Sure that information would help you make a better experience for me, I get that. But that's up to me. If I want a better experience, allow me to provide that information in exchange for the benefits that information gains me. But peeking over my shoulder as I walk through your store so that you can overanalyze everything I do isn't okay.

[hire_charts]

And I'll happily fill out a form to tell you any information I feel is relevant to my purchase. If you want to covertly fingerprint and track me, I'll gladly take my business elsewhere.

[LaGrange]

No it's not. My shipping and payment details might be, if I decide to buy anything. Those are not the same as "who I am."

[bruce343434]

> this kind of analytics can be very useful for user conversion and website design

Excuse my ignorance on web development, but why? How?

[toast0]

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.

[gpvos]

It provides work for your marketing and sales people.

[vinceguidry]

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.

[mjevans]

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

[jccooper]

It checks null. It doesn't check for some nonsense thing inserted by a third party.

[FalconSensei]

I agree with you on the importance of GA for the e-Commerce. But you shouldn't actively prevent users from buying things because GA is not not working (in that case, because of uBlock).

Because of the pandemic, I go to stores wearing a mask. That might prevent me being identified by the cameras (IDK), but the cashiers still sell to me.

[rascul]

There might be other solutions besides Google, though. I'm not knowledgeable in the field but Matomo [0] (used to be Piwik) might be interesting, and there's likely other options which might be better in some ways.

[0] https://matomo.org/

[Beldin]

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.

[vinceguidry]

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.

[ehutch79]

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.

[throwaways885]

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.

[vinceguidry]

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

[LaGrange]

> 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.

[vinceguidry]

You must think a store is just a place managed by genies or something.

[LaGrange]

I'm pretty sure it's managed by people, and doesn't need to constantly surveil people to function.

[xboxnolifes]

No store owners I know manage their store through camera feed.

[rchaud]

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....

[dawnerd]

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

[s_fischer]

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.

[shadowgovt]

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

[dawnerd]

abandoned carts are pretty commonly stored in a database so a followup email can be fired off later in the way. You don't need GA for this.

[rchaud]

Sure, you don't need GA for that. In the same way that you don't need AWS, you could just deploy to on-premises servers.

But people pick AWS because it offers a lot more than just a storage bucket. Same with Google Analytics. It offers a ton of ecommerce analytics including custom tags that can be set by the shop owner. TeeSpring is probably not a full-service Ecomm platform like Magento. It's likely that they are piggybacking on GA's built in Ecomm tracking and reporting capabilities, instead of reinventing the wheel by doing it themselves.

FYI, Ublock Origin also blocks links to "sponsored results" shown on Amazon search.

[benhurmarcel]

I hate when they do that. Obviously if I've abandoned the cart I had a reason for it, most likely the shipping fee is too high. If you haven't changed it don't spam me.

[Dudeman112]

Unless you're a big or medium sized org, fixing an issue that is seen by less than 0.01% of visitors is probably waaay down the priority list on the backlog

[ianhawes]

I beg to differ, we've run into issues with ad-blocking before and our target audience is definitely NOT on the tech-savvy side.

[adrr]

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

[mjevans]

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.

[Nextgrid]

“Anti-fraud” is just another word for spyware. If my bank supports 3D-Secure then your exposure to fraud is zero and you have no reason to stalk me for “anti-fraud” purposes.

[adrr]

No one uses 3D secure in the US. As a consumer I don’t use 3D secure because it shifts the liability on to me. Why would I expose myself to that risk when using the card number puts all the risk on the merchant?

There is also more than just unauthorized purchased. There is also card testers that test to see if the card is still valid.

[Nextgrid]

My point is that if there's zero exposure to fraud then the purchase should go ahead regardless of whether the anti-fraud libraries load or provide a negative result.

So this means that users who expose the site to fraud must allow the anti-fraud libraries to track them, or switch to a bank that offers 3D-Secure so that liability is shifted to the bank and they no longer need to be tracked. Seems like a win-win situation.

> There is also card testers that test to see if the card is still valid.

Same scenario applies? If it's protected by 3D-Secure, who cares? The bank will end up paying the cost of it, not the merchant. If anything, this is a problem I'd love to have, as it means if I can identify those reliably I can keep pocketing money without even having to send out any actual goods.

[MomoXenosaga]

I have a backup browser for this. My main browser is locked down so tight it would take me ages to disable all the protections.

[m463]

GA? Some carts have 20 other sites they contact.