Or they could stop spying on their customers and trying to figure out how to add dark patterns to maximize "engagement" and "conversion" lol.

I mean yeah, I get that if you inadvertently make the checkout button hard to find, you'll lose potential sales, but I don't think you need intricate data about what your customers are doing to figure that out.

Not sure about dark patterns, but you're talking about magnitudes of tens if not hundreds of thousands of visitors here.

Increasing conversion rate by even a few percentage points has huge revenue implications.

They already do that, there’s all kinds of XML and JSON and whatnot standards to communicate product info, inventory, whatnot. The reason Google is doing this is because this information cannot be trusted all the time, there will always be bad actors.

The process may eventually evolve in a cat-and-mouse game, where malicious e-commerce sites try to detect these Google crawlers and serve different price info to them, but let’s hope it doesn’t get this far.

Given the possibility you get detected and it impacts your organic search ranking... I'm not sure any serious vendor would risk it. And if they do, let them burn.

Or quietly detect the bots and feed them junk data after they've gone through the hoops. Not saying it's the better option, but knowing the business maybe the more likely one.

> Or quietly detect the bots and feed them junk data

Just a few customers with alternative browsers being detected as "bots" will poison your reputation and income stream.

No, it definitely won’t. In fact our card payment system has been updated to think alternative os and browsers are high-risk and even decline payment. We didn’t have any revenue loss.

That's why bots now mimic users beyond user agents, even going so far as loading page assets and javascript. Unless you're using something like recaptcha V3, it's going to be difficult to detect them, and even that requires some interactions first.

As someone who uses an alternative browser… I kinda doubt it. As a group we wouldn’t even move the analytics needle let alone revenue.

Nah. Google doesn't even let people log into their own email with alternative browsers, and they are doing fine.

Which is why it should be a chrome extension (like Honey); exfiltrate the data out while providing the end user financial benefits. Messing with the data breaks the user experience and impacts revenue of the target site.