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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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).
Tracking should rely on the tracking service, not the checkout process
I am none of your business.
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.
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.
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.
Excuse my ignorance on web development, but why? How?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"How would you even know that?" I hear you ask. Well, that's an interesting story....
It's not deep scanning your hard drive to try and figure out your SSN or medical history like some people think.
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.
There is also more than just unauthorized purchased. There is also card testers that test to see if the card is still valid.
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.
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?