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This bot is simply trying to get the final price (with tax and shipping) which is ridiculous because e-commerce storefronts should do that in the first place wi
by whoisjuan 6y ago
This bot is simply trying to get the final price (with tax and shipping) which is ridiculous because e-commerce storefronts should do that in the first place without going through the whole checkout process.
I always have found that kind of shady but it's probably known to increase conversions.
What I found interesting is that this an open attack vector for e-commerces. Multiple bots can hit a website and start adding items and start the checkout process. This basically creates an unprecedented cart behavior data influx that ruins any possible usage for data coming from legit customers. Maybe cleaning the data wouldn't be that hard but if someone knows what they are doing they can really make it hard (separate IPs, emails and cart behavior)
I doubt Shopify or Magento have anything to prevent this.
- gowld 6y agoThere's a tiktok meme doing this to harass the Trump campaign's online store.
- sp332 6y agoe-commerce storefronts should do that in the first place without going through the whole checkout process Yes but how would you verify this or hold them accountable?
- gruez 6y ago> This bot is simply trying to get the final price (with tax and shipping) which is ridiculous because e-commerce storefronts should do that in the first place without going through the whole checkout process. It's usually not possible because you don't know how much the shipping + taxes are until the customer enters the billing information.
- whoisjuan 6y agoYeah that's true. But from a UX perspective there are ways to make this less opaque. Perhaps a call to action at the top of the listing with an entry box to enter the Zip Code so an approximate final price can be calculated. Any good UX designer can come up with a solution for this in a couple of hours or less. There's just no motivation to make it happen because this obfuscation of data is particularly optimized and useful for the sellers.
- neutronicus 6y agoe-commerce sites seem to be asking for my location all the time anyways. If they're doing that anyways, they should have everything they need to hazard a pretty good guess (and then they have an actual inducement for me to provide it).
- whoisjuan 6y agoAgree!
- TeMPOraL 6y agoZIP code box that doesn't oblige you to provide any more accurate data, and also without it, it should still be possible to display brackets. "Shipping: $6 - $24, [enter ZIP code for detailed quote]".
- jeanvalmarc 6y agoAmazon just lists it as a "subtotal," which I think is probably the best way to do it. I don't know about the "UX designer in a couple of hours" line: automatic shipping is a nightmarish bag of worms and isn't really a UX problem. What do you do if they order multiple SKU's that don't pack nicely into one box or are warehoused in different locations? Or if there is something weird about their shipping address? What do you use for box size and weight, and what approximation did you use for dunnage? You can approximate UPS/FedEX costs by fitting a trend line, they are decently modeled by a linear (base charge + K*distance) function, but when you go to buy the label you might be way off. This puts you in the lose-lose-lose of either eating the difference of wrong estimates, overcharging for shipping and losing conversions, or just making people hate you by increasing the shipping over the estimate. Making a shipping API call is noticeably slow, so most people require an interaction after the address is entered. Tim Sweeney's hot take was that "the two hardest problems in computer science are cache invalidation and shopping carts!"
- stronglikedan 6y agoI just used a website that had a simple form at the bottom of the cart. It had one text input for the postal code, and a button to get the rates to that postal code based on what was in my cart. IMHO, this is how it's done right, since all you need to know is general location and weight.
- jiofih 6y agoMaybe I haven’t done enough online shopping recently, but as far back as I remember this used to be the norm: enter postcode to calculate shipping, get precise final price without even adding to cart. Is it not the case anymore?
- the_pwner224 6y agoOn many websites it still is. But recently many smaller independent stores use the Shopify platform where shipping is the penultimate step, before billing. You have to give address, email(!), phone number(!, mandatory), etc. before getting the price. I normally just use a fake email and number to get shipping price, and then do the actual checkout in incognito. Pretty sure if you do enter your real info and don't continue with the purchase then you'll get email spam telling you to buy stuff.
- gruez 6y agoI'm pretty sure most sites (eg. Amazon) does the same thing. Probably for the reason you mentioned: so they can have your contact information to send you spam later.
- judge2020 6y agoHaven't received any "items in your cart" emails from Amazon peronally, but I will end up seeing Ads for the products later on.
- datenhorst 6y agoMy girlfriend uses this as a pretty effective tactic to get discounts - you just have to wait a couple of days and they'll send you an email with a lower price to keep down abandonment rates
- wdb 6y agoThey could at least include the tax in the price. That's normally fixed depending on the item category e.g. low or high tax rate. Only the US is being weird with its taxes.
- ww520 6y agoTax is depending on where the buyer is coming from.
- kube-system 6y agoCanada has provincial sales taxes. It's really not that weird when you consider the US is not a unitary state.
- enriquto 6y ago> It's usually not possible because you don't know how much the shipping + taxes are until the customer enters the billing information. Sure, they show you a different content depending on your IP address and lots of shady heuristics, but when it comes to estimate a shipping cost, it is absolutely impossible: you can just be anywhere, who knows where you are. I say bullshit.
- Ruthalas 6y agoI will bail from the purchasing process on sites that are unwilling to give me a final price before I enter payment information. A postal code should suffice, and I'm not providing more personal information if the site is unwilling to say what I'll be charged upfront.
- texasbigdata 6y agoIsn't that most of them? Unless you assume they eat variable shipping by 'fronting' you a fixed price. Apologies if I'm misunderstanding what you're saying.
- Ruthalas 6y agoIt is still typical (for which I am thankful), but that seems to be shifting a bit. A relatively common example would be shops using the Shopify platform.
- ehsankia 6y agoI don't know if this is true, but I've been many websites that actually claim that they have an extra deal they can't show you until you put the item in the cart. I used to see those a lot a few years ago, not sure if it was a real legal thing or just a trick to get people to add it, but that was definitely a thing and not related to tax+shipping.
- kube-system 6y agoIt is a contractual obligation with the product manufacturer. Something like: we will allow you to sell our product but only if you don't advertise discounts more than x%.
- bronzeage 6y agoMakes you wonder whether the smart thing to do is just make it convenient for the bots to get the info out so they won't ruin your data and waste your bandwidth. Can't fight them, join them. Can't really stop free information flow.
- kqr 6y agoOr 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.
- toomuchtodo 6y agoWhich 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.
- inetknght 6y ago> 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.
- Spivak 6y agoAs someone who uses an alternative browser… I kinda doubt it. As a group we wouldn’t even move the analytics needle let alone revenue.
- rabanne 6y agoNo, 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.
- bduerst 6y agoThat'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.
- mmcconnell1618 6y agoNot all shipping charges can be calculated ahead of time. For example, you may offer free shipping on orders over $50. You may charge $9.99 for the first item, $5.99 for each additional item. You may charge by weight of the whole order. You may have oversized items or packages that can be combined to reduce shipping charges. Some items may ship together as OTR Freight, while others can go via the local postal service. Buying multiple items changes this calculation. So, yes, you can estimate shipping for a single item but you can't always present the per-item shipping charge as it depends on the context of the whole order.
- jasonv 6y agoWhat this poster said. Yes, a lot of smaller e-commerce platforms could do this, but finalizing order value can be a very complex workflow for bigger merchants with more varied sku mixes. I’ve worked in multi-billion dollar Ecom companies where the programs to refine the order checkout process gets scoped as a multi year effort accounting for a couple of decades of legacy cruft... even if you separate the “product/tax/shipping” calculations from the “customer/credit/rewards” dependencies. But it’s often not worth separating them because they’re very inter-dependent. Moreso when you involve drop shipping or made-to-order things.
- clairity 6y agothat's true that the calculations can get complicated pretty quickly in ecommerce, but google probably has all the data it needs (origin zip, destination zip, likely carrier(s), possibly even the weight/size of each item) to provide a pretty good estimate in most cases. they could even calculate a range for [1 item per box, all items in 1 box]. the important bit is to present it as a separate line item (with grand total) so that consumers can decide how much to trust the estimate. that would be an even clearer shot across the bow of amazon, walmart, and the like, who provide comparison across their own platform merchants, but not across all merchants everywhere.
- gwright 6y agoGoogle guessing seems like a terrible idea. That will just confuse the consumer when they go to purchase and find a different value, possibly creating a customer service problem for the vendor through no fault of their own.
- cglace 6y agoHow do you show a final price if you don't have all the information needed: tax locality, shipping preference, total cart value discounts etc.
- alpha_squared 6y agoIf I'm remembering right, Best Buy used to have "deals" on items that they "couldn't show you" until item was in cart. They may still be doing this. Best Buy's justification for it was that its agreements with manufacturers prevented it from displaying items below certain prices on their site. I'd never seen this elsewhere to know how pervasive these agreements were (or if Best Buy was just taking losses on certain items).
- thaumasiotes 6y ago> Best Buy used to have "deals" on items that they "couldn't show you" until item was in cart. They may still be doing this. Best Buy's justification for it was that its agreements with manufacturers prevented it from displaying items below certain prices on their site. I'd never seen this elsewhere to know how pervasive these agreements were This was also pretty common on Amazon.
- hundchenkatze 6y agoNewegg still does this. Here's an item from their 4th of July sale. https://www.newegg.com/p/2AM-008Y-00003?Item=9SIAEG2BMZ4393 https://www.newegg.com/p/2AM-008Y-00003?Item=9SIAEG2BMZ4393
- whoisjuan 6y agoThey still do it.
- Spivak 6y agoKitchenAid is famous for these kinds of agreements as a measure to ensure the public perception of their value doesn’t go down whenever there are sales.
- randomdude402 6y ago
- lalos 6y agoAlso, seems like a clever hack for automated scraping after all most carts are pretty uniform in their structure.
- miohtama 6y agoAll EU prices must be tax included. All hospitality prices must include cleaning and service fees. It is only the US were hidden fees and charges may apply and the price regulation, if any, is more tilted towards corporations. Only upfront shipping charge is tricky because it depends on so many factors.
- shultays 6y agoI find not including tax better tbh. That way people are being reminded how much tax they are with every purchase.
- input_sh 6y agoEvery EU bill should come with the price without VAT (value-added tax) and with the VAT applied, leading to the same result. The only difference is that the VAT is a certain % depending on your country (mostly 15-25%), making it easy for a merchant to calculate it with a single data point. Percentage is also always a fixed round number, so you can calculate it in your head when you stumble upon "+ VAT" somewhere without providing that data point to the merchant for calculation purposes.
- bcrosby95 6y agoYeah. It's easy in the EU. My favorite example of how absurd it can get in the US: one side of my friend's street has 9.5% sales tax, the other side has 7.25%. same state, city, and zip.
- shultays 6y agoYea, you still can get the info but how many people do really care. I am just saying the people would be more aware on how much they are being taxed. Imo making it obvious like US does would be more helpful even if it is not as convenient I used to live in Turkey, where taxes on some stuff are insane but most people won't ever know because it is not as obvious. In a similar vein, income tax is also quite hidden in Turkey, at least from yhe perspective of employee
- 6y ago
- alasdair_ 6y ago>which is ridiculous because e-commerce storefronts should do that in the first place without going through the whole checkout process. On top of the other reasons mentioned, the seller may have a contract with the manufacturer that covers a "minimum advertised price" "The FTC says that the price displayed in a secure or encrypted shopping cart isn’t subject to MAP because it’s technically not advertising." (https://www.thebalancesmb.com/what-is-minimum-advertised-price-2890196 https://www.thebalancesmb.com/what-is-minimum-advertised-pri...)
- crazygringo 6y agoNot only that, but certain brands on certain sites won't show the price, with that message "add to cart to see the price!" I've heard varying explanations as to why, but at the end of the day it doesn't matter. Adding to the cart is the only way to scrape the price.
- mkl 6y agoIt seems like it will also mess up item availability information. If an item has limited stock, bots adding it to carts could make it appear out of stock to real customers.
- randomdude402 6y agoMost sites don't subtract it from inventory until it's on a completed order. The main exceptions I can think of are venue and plane tickets, and hotel rooms. These might put a hold on a specific piece of inventory for a short time. They usually tell you when they do.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ehnto 6y agoThere's a lot that goes into when and where you can show the final item price. Assuming a simple product, you don't know where the user lives so you can't apply the correct taxes yet. In AUS this is easy because it's the same nationally. But in the US there are dozens of tax combinations that could be applied depending on the location. Shipping obviously depends on where you live and what you're buying, and few places charge per item shipping these days so it doesn't even make sense to include shipping in a single item cost. Then you have customer group discounts, some customers get different pricing when they are logged in, even item combinations in the cart can have different prices, you get the idea. It is usually not possible to calculate ahead of time.
- thawkins 6y agoAs a developer of automotive ecommerce sites, it is very common for sites to list a higher price 0h the catalog, and show the true (generaly lower) price in the cart. This is becuase the businessmodels are highly margin sensative, and competative pricing can have big impact, so its a measure to try and mask real pricing.