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Comment by vinceguidry | Hacker News Reader

I worked for an e-commerce outfit for several years. Let me tell you they don't have massive budgets to use for R&D. Every last one of them uses off-the-shelf solutions, they have to, because they can't afford to pay a programmer to customize one for them. Their marketing teams work around the limitations of the software.

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.

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No excuse for breaking the website with the tracking though. NULL is a valid field in databases for good reason.

It checks null. It doesn't check for some nonsense thing inserted by a third party.

I agree with you on the importance of GA for the e-Commerce. But you shouldn't actively prevent users from buying things because GA is not not working (in that case, because of uBlock).

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.

There might be other solutions besides Google, though. I'm not knowledgeable in the field but Matomo [0] (used to be Piwik) might be interesting, and there's likely other options which might be better in some ways.

[0] https://matomo.org/

No.

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.

Good luck training your fresh-out-of-college marketing team on your homespun http log analytics tool. Even if you succeed, your CFO will convince your CEO to move to GA eventually. Ask me how I know.

Don't try and talk sense into the commenters here. Their use case is the only one that matters, and they lack the imagination to think that other people have different budgets, time, or expertise than them.

There are people here who believe Google Analytics is the absolute devil, the reality is much more benign.

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.

Go somewhere in person and there's probably orders of magnitude more data being collected on your activities.

> And they'd be absolutely blind without GA.

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.

You must think a store is just a place managed by genies or something.

I'm pretty sure it's managed by people, and doesn't need to constantly surveil people to function.

No store owners I know manage their store through camera feed.

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