I find that stores which do this tend to be more interested in making a sale than ensuring you have something you're happy with and want/need.

What should we expect from sites which behave like this?

Even then, too many sites replaced their point of contact with these trivial keyword kind of chat bot interfaces and it's annoying as heck.

I tried to report a phishing page hosted on some random SaaS thing yesterday. Instead of a contact form / abuse contact e-mail in the page footer I ended up on a FAQ page telling me to report it using their chat thing. Of course that chat was not staffed without any indication until you typed up a message (another frequent factor of annoyance for those not in US-adjacent time zones) and the keyword matcher asked me if the FAQ page I was on would be of any help. When I put the data in the thing to go on with my day it asked me for an e-mail to follow-up with me, something this interaction did not require.

Sure, I get when people get more customer interaction from these things but please folks, make sure it's not replacing functionality for other parts of your (potential) customer base.

And I can agree with you. There is actually nearly always a customer segment that finds chatbots and popups totally annoying. This usually ends up in this segment leaving the site disproportionately due to the modals, which leads to a loss of revenue.

At the same time there is a segment (usually much larger) that appreciates chatbots and FAQ modals - even on the first visit. Here these functionalities lead to a significant increase in sales.

I think that it is quite difficult to automatically assign the user to the appropriate segment and adjust the behavior of the website accordingly. Unfortunately.

Du such popups annoy me and I belong in the same segment as you? Absolutely. Am I an empiricist and do I have to advise most of my clients on such functionalities after appropriate tests because they boost sales? Also absolutely.

And on the question of GDPR modals, I'm afraid I have to say that they are an absolute legal necessity. Unfortunately, the way they have been implemented in most cases I know of is designed to put the user behind the scenes and make him accept more tracking/cookies than he would like to. These things annoy me so much and should be banned from the net.

I block cookies from all sites by default, and make exceptions for the few that I need to log into. The result is the GDPR modals keep popping up because the modals can't set cookies to remember whether or not I accepted.

So the only thing I can do is inject JS/CSS to block them.

(Also by de-modalizing it and hiding it, I never actually need to accept anything, and nobody gets my permission to track, hee hee.)

They absolutely are not a legal necessity if you don't do things you shouldn't be doing. That's the point of GDPR :).

But of course doing these things, putting up the popups, and then trying to direct users' anger at Brussels is empirically the revenue-maximizing strategy, so here we are.

Hah. You expect sites to not track you just because you are there for the first time? If that were the case there’d probably be no GDPR.

The unfortunate result is that the goddamn GDPR warnings keep popping up, because ironically, the way those websites remember that you either "accepted" or "denied" the tracking request is to leave a cookie, and I don't allow or want to allow that cookie.

EDIT: Separately, there are many websites that only have an "accept" button and no "decline" button. By blocking the modal dialog boxes, I never actually "accepted", and therefore they never got my permission to track. Ha!

GDPR is about a lot more than just cookies.

>By blocking the modal dialog boxes, I never actually "accepted", and therefore they never got my permission to track. Ha!

Unfortunately they probably treat this as if you accepted the modal (which is against GDPR).

Sure, but they can't track me anyway :)

GDPR is about all tracking - cookies are just one implementation.