Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryanmarsh | Hacker News Reader

I was showing this exact problem to my wife, a moment after trying to order something from The Container Store and their website being broken, just after trying to pay a bill and that website not working too.

I swear to God this f**ing industry.

View on HN

Reminds me of the parking at my local lake were you now have to read a 60 page EULA, a 30 page data "protection" agreement and install an app which requires way too many permissions. I happily paid the quite reasonable parking fee in the past when there still was a human person collecting the money. She was very friendly and always had an interesting story to tell, but now she's out of her job. Anyway, the surveillance cameras have been vandalized and parking is free now.

>Anyway, the surveillance cameras have been vandalized and parking is free now.

This totally reads like you just did the vandalizing. Just saying ;-)

Do you have an adblocker on? It will frequently break sites especially in the checkout process I have found (probably because their crappy code calls some tracking/analytics script without try/catch and can't continue). 90% of the time disabling it for the page will fix these broken sites.

> I swear to God this f*ing industry.

this again. Developers and any publisher should test their stuff with ad blockers enabled.

Why? They test in default configurations. As someone who changes many, many default settings, I don't expect developers to test in every possible combination of non-default settings, browser extensions, atypical devices, text zoom settings, etc.

I'd bet there's a pretty solid correlation between using an ad blocker and propensity to spend money, if only because the good ones only run on desktop browsers. Someone who owns a keyboard is likely to be white collar if they aren't a student.

So if you want to leave money on the table because some dumb script which has no bearing on selling the product breaks, go ahead and damage that funnel.

These analytics scripts aren't critical and the checkout process shouldn't go down just because they don't load. It could be a user on spotty wifi or even the external service being down entirely. I agree that they shouldn't test all the functions of random third party extensions, but this failure point is pretty foreseeable for reasons besides adblock.

Your website breaking while someone is actively trying to spend money on it is very very bad. It means someone who was definitely willing to pay you is not paying you. Ecommerce companies spend a lot of money on optimizations intended to keep users from abandoning the checkout process. Single-digit percentage improvements result in large increases in revenue. Ensuring the checkout actually functions is about the least a site can do to ensure users don't abandon the process.

A quick web search suggests somewhere between 25% and 45% of web users block ads in some way in 2022, depending on who, where, and how you ask.

Thanks for troubleshooting for me but no. Just a stock popular browser.

I'm always coming across airline and hotel sites that don't work for days at a time, or which don't work in Firefox etc. Latest was EVA Air a week ago.

When I think about the money these kind of sites in particular must be losing from shoddy engineering... I honestly don't know how their devs get away with it!

I’ll tell you how, because I had a client in this exact situation. The business just sees fluctuations in sales. They don’t see error rates. In traditional businesses SW engineering keeps the dynatrace logs close to the vest.

I convinced a dev to walk me through their dynatrace console. I dug in and took screenshots then gave them to h to the business. The business demanded access to dynatrace and then was able to correlate error rates with revenue fluctuations (down to the hour of the day, people are habitual). They came up with a cost factor and figured out how much they’re losing. This led to budget being allocated for a project to solve these problems. I bid on the work but was denied. The VP of IT at this point hated me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com