What's really stupid are sites from which you can buy things, but then pop up an ad for something else. Fandango, which sells movie tickets, does this. As you're trying to get to the "buy ticket" page, they shove movie trailers for other movies in your face.
I mentioned a site earlier today which sold plumbing supplies.[1] They pop up a "gimme your email" box which 1) cannot be dismissed, and 2) isn't even theirs, it's from "justuno.com", a spamming service.
These outfits have lost sight of what their web site is for. They're putting obstacles in front of a customer who's about to give them money. This is usually considered a big mistake in retail.
Pop-ups asking me to please take a survey about the user experience of the website, too. Well, I was trying to actually buy something on your website, before your goddamn survey pop-up got in the way.
I've had many sites pop this up within seconds of being on the site. Though the attention span of some might be short, I suspect the data collected by these surveys is highly unhelpful simply because you have not yet experienced the product.
Given they're all from the same company usually whose name escapes me right now, you'd think they'd be better at it?
One of my lobby conversations at a SEM conference dealt with those quick survey popups. The guy I was talking to swore that by putting one on their landing pages conversion increased by like 30%. His theory was that it helps to refocus users who are about to bounce. Give them a second to digest the page and right before they click the back button bring SOMETHING up to grab their attention. They'll just click the survey away and will come back to the page fresh again.
I've never tested it, so I have no idea if it works. It's an interesting hypothesis at least.
It could even be true, for his customers. For all you know, he sells inflatable sex dolls, and it's important to focus users to get that sale. The tactics that work for sites selling more mainstream products are probably different.
The worst part about their worthless surveys is that it's pretty much impossible to give feedback about the actual survey itself.
It's easy to see how this happens; a clueless exec at big-corp decides they need data, survey company gives them a sales pitch they can't refuse, exec never bothers to actually check out the product.
These worthless surveys are almost exclusively on the websites large enterprisey companies that got off the clue-train years ago.
Lots of unhappy customers in the survey. And we gave that to you for free- we could optimize your web page - for a fee. Even take the survey out- or to the exist- after we are done.
Also, e-commerce websites that require creation of an account to buy something. There were countless times that I had a credit card in hand, and I gave up when the stupid website required me to register a user account in order to pay and check out.
Extra negative points if your account creation process requires a phone number or e-mail address verification step.
A good e-commerce site will give you the option of creating an account only at the end of checkout and the account is totally optional. I've seen it before but unfortunately it's not the majority.
Also also e-commerce sites which don't carry your basket over from non-logged-in to logged-in states (ie you start shopping, then remember to login before checking out.)
Generally that survey result get discarded; one big trick used by many apps is to have surveys that distract you away from leaving negative results in the appstore or other places where the survey result actually counts.
Seen it a few times, although not so much recently... An app would pop up a rating dialog, asking you to give it 1-5 stars. If you chose 5 stars, it would send you on to the Play Store to leave your rating - if you chose 1-4, it would instead give you an in-app feedback form. They couldn't force you to actually leave a 5 star rating, but it was pretty dodgy anyway.
The main problem I have is that these popups rarely preload the content. This means that if you are visiting the page internationally, you could be staring at a greyed-out page for a good second before the "X" loads. CTRL+F4 is now a reflex to that backdrop. If your page is less important than an advert then I can't imagine me finding it all that important.
I blame this on A/B tests which ignore externalities. Sure, maybe the 3 metrics you were aiming for were improved, but your brand is fucked. I think brands like Sears/Kenmore/Craftsman were A/Bed to death. So many little 'optimizations' (read: cost cutting that looked-good-on-paper) that eventually destroyed what the brand was about in the first place.
I think this is related to my fundamental problem with A/B testing: when people A/B test individual variables they'll take a greedy optimization that gets stuck in local minima.
The other problem is that you only understand the change in metrics you measure and things like "satisfaction" are often lost.
It's customary to state the optimization problem such that you're minimizing a function - hence "local minima". If you want to maximize something, you simply negate the function.
In the case of Fandango showing an interstitial ad when attempting to check out, I can't imagine that wouldn't hurt conversion, and I can't imagine that conversion wouldn't be one the key metrics they would test with. I would guess it's more just a lack of care. Someone said "we need our website to make more money" and someone else said "okay, I hear that ads are for making more money."
Well, presumably they're reselling these tickets on behalf of the theaters which get the bulk of the revenue. It's possible Fandango takes no margin on the tickets sales and just makes money on the ads.
They take a fixed fee per ticket. It's a good model.
Like most ticketing operations, they've built a niche monopoly. If you want to buy tickets online, they are usually the only game in town. If the obnoxious ads annoy you, their attitude is basically "fuck you, drive to the mall and miss your movie".
This is called a "moat". Build it for your company, it's a good thing for an entrepreneur.
To be significantly successful, you need to stop thinking this way. Start thinking about what benefits you & your company.
It may seem like contempt for the consumer, and perhaps it is. But it's also possible the consumer is irrational and you can benefit in the short and long term.
I work in marketing, and have seen scant evidence for the value of a "brand". It's mostly branding people making an argument that comic sans devalues our brand, whereas the data clearly shows it doesn't.
The "long term harm" argument is indistinguishable from "i know better than you and I want it this way." It may be true, but it's unprovable.
> I work in marketing, and have seen scant evidence for the value of a "brand"
To what do you attribute the success of, say Coca Cola, rather than generic cola? Price and a good distribution network? Surely brand must contribute a little.
I don't know much about how branding works at that scale. But I don't think it's very effective for small/medium companies, and can be quite a money sink.
In nearly every SMB branding exercise/project I've participated in, the need for a brand, and the benefits it provides, are entirely limited to the egos of the employees.
I have seen this "we can't measure branding but we can measure conversion rates so let's optimize optimize optimize" approach borne out to create some of the worst websites. High converting, surely, but spammy, ugly, constantly trying to jam you into the funnel, full of dark patterns etc. Usually utterly forgettable, but often memorable for how crappy the experience is.
In my experience companies that do this are thinking very short term: how many people can we get through our funnel this month and how much money can we make from them? Yes it's hard to measure 'long term harm', but to assume it doesn't exist because it can't be directly measured makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot.
To me it is worth aspiring to be respected as a business. Obviously not to the point of letting your business fail because you obsessed over branding while nobody actually bought your product, but as a larger goal. A business that tries to squeeze customers for all it can and achieves grudging acceptance isn't something I aspire to be a part of.
The problem with a brand is that you don't know if it's the most effective use of the resources that go into it.
Coca Cola has nearly infinite resources, compared to the jobs I've worked (<$75mm annual revenue).
Even then, can they prove the value of their brand is an effective use of their marketing dollars? What I've read has a lot of correlations that could be explained by other causes.
It's difficult to measure the value of a brand, and most companies don't bother. It's expensive, because you have to pay actual people to talk to other people in a systematic way, over a long period of time.
Brand awareness is the measurement of the degree to which potential customers know that your product or service is an option when they are ready to make a purchase. You can't measure it from your marketing interactions alone, because the data set of your interactions is biased toward potential customers who are already aware of you. You can only measure it by performing statistically valid sampling of potential customers. The business purpose of measuring awareness is to help you find customers who have never interacted with your brand.
Brand affinity is the measurement of the degree to which potential customers have an emotional attachment to your product or service. A good shorthand is the degree to which a potential customer thinks of themselves as a "________ person." Think of a dude in a pickup truck saying "I'm a Ford guy, they've never let me down," or a person who won't even look at a phone that is not an iPhone. Again--the only way to measure this is by performing statistically valid sampling of potential customers. Measuring your marketing interactions alone will give you an artificially high measure of your affinity.
Design standards are important to both awareness and affinity.
A standard look helps the customer make mental connections between all the various times they've been exposed to your brand--this raises awareness. Comic Sans is not necessarily bad for awareness as long as you use it consistently in an intentional way. Randomly varying your fonts is bad, though, because it makes you "look" like several different brands, which means you will need to deliver more interactions to raise awareness.
Comic sans also might harm certain affinities, for example along the lines of being "sophisticated" or "beautiful." If a customer wants to think of themselves as sophisticated, they will seek brands that also present themselves that way. You're not going to see Mercedes Benz, which depends heavily on affinities of sophistication and elegance, using Comic Sans. You might see Scion, which depends on affinities of quirkiness and irony, use it. But again, the point is to be intentional.
Companies that are good at branding tend to be good either because they measure it compulsively (example: Proctor and Gamble), or because they are good at making internal opinionated decisions that stick (example: Apple).
Either way, the day to day operation of a strong brand does indeed look like a few people within a company telling everyone else what they can and cannot do with design.
Thank you for taking the time to write this. Honestly, it makes a lot of sense.
I don't have any experience with billion dollar companies. Have you worked in the industry and seen how they measure their campaign efficacies in huge companies? I bet it's really different than what I've seen.
Based on what I've seen, it's a lot of story telling that "branding" works. The question is, does it work better than if the company had put those resources into other avenues? Improve the product. Decrease the cost to consumer. Better customer service.
Here's a good cro vs. branding article, check out the Intel Inside section. [0].
There's a lot of money being made by people working in branding. If their field actually wasn't very effective, I wonder if it would be possible for them to accept it. I generally wouldn't want to find out that my career has essentially been a waste, and I created no value. (insert sinclair quote here)
It's probable that there is no grand strategy, but it might make sense if their model finds you unlikely to convert and the conversion price is very low. It's not necessarily flat per movie, they may be losing money on that one as part of a package deal.
Not to mention that, for abstract judgements like "product quality", these can also compound in non-linear fashion. Three A/B tests could show only minor effects on perception of product quality, but then if you put the original A next to the final B, you'll get much bigger differences.
Heh, measuring average and unbiased user opinions on the internet is probably the second most uncertain thing in this universe after actual uncertainty in quantum systems.
Both opt-in and opt-out ways of doing surveys on your website introduce bias. The opt-out (read: in your face pop-up) is more likely to make people angry which makes them more likely to leave negative reviews.
The opt-in version will only be found by people having a relatively extreme opinion about your site, good or bad.
The difference being in the quantity of the data. The first will probably be answered by more people, since the people who'd have completed the survey in the second case are probably more or less a subset of the people who would complete the survey in the first case. All of this makes it no surprise that most websites that want to have any kind of feedback from their users go for the opt-out strategy. More is better if less is not in any way more :)
Good point. I see this almost on a daily basis with clients. They miss the forrest for the trees. Its dumb to optimize for email capture when people end up hating your brand as a result of it. I remove all pop ups and simply add clear calls to action in different places in the page. They are static components that are part of the layout. The copy is then adjusted to drive invite people to subscribe. I get higher quality conversions. Its not the quantity but the quality of the leads. People forget that.
Sears was not killed by any tweaks or optimizations - it was a brand that was past it's time, culture changed, and it could not find a new way forward.
Sears was the Amazon of its day (around the early 1900s) where you could order almost anything via mail (including housed!). I guess the felt that products via the mail was so 19th century.
I think it didn't adapt to the times. It was the Amazon of a past generation, with its own very high quality version of AmazonBasics. They didn't make the transition to a new reality though.
It's a good thing that ublock origin can be installed on firefox mobile (android). Firefox on Android isn't nearly as fast in UI performance as chrome, but the ability to use standard firefox plugins makes up for it.
I use firefox on mobile for exactly this reason, which is funny, as I use chrome on the desktop.
It used to be that Google Now obeyed your browser choice when opening links. When it started forcing chrome, I had to actually uninstall chrome in order to make it use firefox to open the news article tiles it presents to me.
I didn't know that, thanks. I remember how much I love ublock origin when I start visiting websites in chrome on mobile. We get used with a clean browsing and feels like this is the norm until you have to do the same thing on mobile.
I respond to undismissable email popups by entering abuse@theirdomain.com as an email address. I'm sure their network operations team doesn't want to miss out on the incredible rewards.
> This is usually considered a big mistake in retail.
Is it? Grocery stores keep essentials far away from each other so you have to walk past stuff you don't want in order to get to what you want. Imagine a store where they had milk at the checkout counter! That's the retail equivalent of amazon.com ;)
Milk is kept at the back of the store because that's the easiest please to put it from a logistics stand point. The truck the milk comes in pulls up to the back of the store and can immediately unload it into the giant refrigerated rooms at the back of the store. The fact that it helps "build the basket" by being at the back is a happy coincidence for the store.
My supermarket has a stock of the higher priced name brand milk at the front of the store, near the checkouts. I assume that's to grab both people who forgot to get milk and don't want to lose their place in line, and people who are there only for milk and want to get in and out.
The less expensive store-brand-label milk is at the back of the store where the big walk-in coolers are.
Contrary to what you would think as a consumer, grocery chains almost always want you to buy their brand (the less expensive one) because the margins on store-brand items are much better. That's why the stores bother selling them in the first place (and why margin-hungry companies like CVS will have every popular placed side-by-side with a store brand)
And that is probably the reason for the milk up front. The name-brand milk producer is paying big bucks for space in that cooler near the checkout, enough to offset the supermarket's probable loss in sales of their own store-brand milk in its normal location in back.
The cold chain thing is plausible, but I doubt it.
Supermarkets have varying strategies for stuff, including cold items. The supermarkets around me put ice cream in either a center aisle or the second to last aisle, in the front of the store. The "smarter" store from a data standpoint has pint ice cream in an end cap next to the florist to nab women. Milk is always back corner.
If they can figure out how to maintain the cold chain for ice cream, I'm sure milk would be easier to move around.
They almost certainly move vastly higher volumes of milk than ice cream, making logistics a bigger concern.
It not that it's impossible to maintain the cold chain with other placements, it's that there is a cost (including that imposed by floor traffic) in doing so. Putting it someplace where a large volume walk-in cooler can be directly loaded from a truck and the display stocked from that without employee floor traffic across the store reduces the costs (labor, losses, and otherwise) of selling milk.
Your last sentence is more relevant than it seems on first glance. If the majority of Target shoppers are looking for the seasonal section and not milk, then it's actually pretty equivalent.
I always find this interesting, as Target is pretty smart about merchandising. My guess here is that they know that they usually (at least around my hometown) are not top of mind for grocery. Milk is probably a trigger.
Seasonal stuff needs to be in an area of the store they can close off for a few weeks everytime the season changes while they redecorate. During those times they want the seasonable stuff to be out of the way so the construction efforts do not get in the way of customers.
I don't know if this is their logic, but it makes sense.
Definitely down to personal preference, but the milk at our Target is generally in better condition, tastes better, and lasts longer than the milk from Safeway. And the shopping experience in general is much nicer than Safeway.
Safeway is pretty much the bottom-of-the-barrel grocery store in my area, so while I'd agree with that comparison of Safeway to Target, it's less true of Target than just about any competing conventional grocery store.
It's not weird, there's a good reason for it. As I mentioned in a previous comment, its because the milks with a longer shelf life are UHT pasteurized, which uses higher temperatures for a shorter period of time than traditional pasteurization. They are typically labeled "ultra pasteurized." This extends the shelf life of milk.
Additionally, any time you see milk that is shelf stable (doesn't require refrigeration until opened) its been UHT pasteurized and packed in special aseptic packaging.
And, yes, I've noticed that, for some reason, organic milk tends to be UHT pasteurized more often than non-organic milk.
The amount of consumer studies done on grocer layouts is enormous. The direction of foot traffic has been decided from rtl despite our common ltr reading format because it's more profitable to do so, the checkout line with small items marked higher than in other parts of the same store for the same reason, and so much more.
If your sentiment were true, most heavily weighted expendables would all be located in the back simply because of labor. Labor is cheap when you can increase revenue from every potential customer with basic layout adjustments.
> most heavily weighted expendables would all be located in the back simply because of labor
They are. At least in almost every grocery store I've been in. The milk coolers are almost invariably against the back wall, accessible from the stockroom (which itself has the loading dock), as is the butcher / meat department. Both of those departments are probably getting daily deliveries, and it's of stuff that needs to be kept cold, has a short shelf life, and in the case of milk specifically, it needs to be stocked from the back of the shelves so that the oldest items get bought first (i.e. it's FIFO not FILO). It's a real pain to do this if you can't get to the back of the cooler.
Bread, however, is generally in its own aisle because it's not stocked by the store. Vendors (the bakeries) send their own delivery/logistics people in to stock it, so the stores don't really care about how easy it is, and those vendors also pull expired or near-expired items back off.
Produce, despite being expendable and delicate, tends to be towards the front because it's very high-margin for the store and also requires a lot of continual employee attention (and it generally has dedicated employees who just do that). It's admittedly been a long time since I worked in a grocery store, but back in the day in the pecking order of grocery-store floor workers, the produce guys were sort of at the top of the heap. (Although maybe that was because they could hook you up with the "damaged" fruit...)
The store is inevitably surrounded by 4 walls. Often more than one of those walls leads towards the front as part of the "cold chain".
If it were more profitable for the store to stock milk in the front they would - I agree. But the reasoning isn't delivery layout when they manufacture their own layout.
Thank you for this! For the couple of industry insiders they interviewed it seemed like they catered towards a 'helpful to customers' attitude despite what they implement. Could be saving face, could just be easier.
Idk being told to try making it more accessable by a consultant who's job it is to maximize profits and the grocer does "what it wants anyway" doesn't sound right on an industry scale.
I don't think that's really comparable. No one's going to arrive at a store and decide not to buy the milk that they came for because the walk to the back of the store is too much hassle.
More comparable would be like someone standing in front of the checkout and insisting you take a survey before you can pay. In that scenario I can very much imagine someone getting pissed off and leaving.
In the UK there has been a move away from giant supermarkets over the last few years. The consumer electronics and other non-food items that pad out the giant supermarket and make it hard to get to the milk, people buy that stuff online now so it is not possible to 'pile high' in the big box supermarkets.
With this move has been a growth in convenience stores that are operated/franchised by the big supermarket brands. People go to these places for their milk. (And do a big online shop for the bulk of their groceries).
So people are just deciding not to go to the big box stores in the first place.
Anecdote, but this happened to me. Where I was living the largest 'Tesco Extra' imaginable opened up literally across the road. This was AMAZING. Well, not really, within a week we were back to the convenience store buying everything there, it really was too much hassle going to the giant Tesco. Didn't need the kilometre walk past the TV's, clothing and other stuff that was placed between the store entrance and the milk. The 24/7 novelty wore off too, didn't actually need to go shopping for that pint of milk at 2 a.m.
Another part of the problem was that the customer service in the local store was more friendly. They didn't have people to greet you or people giving you free samples or any coupons at the checkout or any loyalty cards. Just polite 'how's your day?' chat with the small team of staff - all known by name - sufficed.
With the big supermarket I don't think there was this inate customer service aspect, 'customer service' was contrived marketing, nobody cared about you. And so it is online. People that do marketing online care more about their Google analytics and loading up websites with spam-scripts than they do about 'reality'. They may have one result per quarter from that pop up, that extra sale is good, a result, success even. Not on their dashboard is how many people didn't buy because of the stupid 'enter email address now:' popup they had on there. Marketing people are not the sharpest knives in the drawer, far too often they lack the skills of empathy and cannot see things from the customer's perspective. Hence they have to use things like statistics in an attempt to make up for their lack of intuition and appreciation of customer service.
I've always taken for granted that I'm only ever about a 15-30 minute drive from a Walmart Supercenter (which has a grocery store in it) that's open 24 hours a day.
They just won't go to the grocery store in the first place. They will buy milk at the gas station instead, or at a drugstore, precisely because the supermarket is so much hassle.
Working with a big food manufacturer some years ago, had a detailed discussion about their relationship with big super markets and how they had to do X offers per year. More interestingly, the end of aisles were known as sh*t bins. You could sell anything there. It just shifted.
Milk in the US is pasteurized as well, but to be shelf stable you need to use a different pasteurization processes called UHT (ultra high temp) and package it in special aseptic packaging. UHT milk is put in traditional containers and stored in the fridge as well.
You can buy self stable milk in the US but it's not very popular for some reason. Except for Yoo-hoo, that's a popular milk product that's usually sold in shelf stable "juice boxes"... and I think it tastes even better at room temperature.
When milk alternatives like soy milk, almound milk, coconut milk, etc., first came to market they were almost always sold shelf stable. I can only assume that's because refrigeration space in supermarkets is sparse and expensive (learned that from Shark Tank) and these were niche products at the time. Now that they are mainstream you can find them refrigerated right next to the dairy milk. I guess Americans prefer to buy milk that way.
Re: wine. Interestingly in the US, due to the fact liquor laws are regulated by the state, when you cross state lines your supermarket alcohol selection will vary drastically. Some states ban alcohol sales in supermarkets entirely. Some allow only beer and wine. Some allow only beer only. Some allow beer, wine, and liquor. I've never heard of a state that banned beer but allowed liquor but who knows, it's possible. It mind boggling just how many crazy (and different) regulations about silly stuff like this exists around alcohol in the US. Funny story, a friend of mine went to a supermarket outside of the state she lived in and was totally mystified she couldn't find Bacardi's. "I've never been to a grocery store that didn't have Bacardi's" She didn't know they weren't allowed to sell it there.
Personally, I'm in a "beer only" state and and wine coolers and malt liquor (colloquially known as "40s") are categorized as "beer."
To be self stable milk needs to be heated hot enough to change the flavor. Americans prefer the taste of milk that has not been heated as much.
I once has breakfast on a real dairy farm, they got their milk from the tank right after milking. After drinking milk that was in the cow just 3 hours before I cannot stand milk you can buy. I cannot say if this is because it was never pasteurized, or just that is was fresh, but the flavor was better.
Note, do not take the above as advocacy for unpasteurized milk. The risks are real enough.
There's no discernible taste difference (to me, at the very least) between traditionally pasteurized milk and UHT pasteurized milk. I seriously doubt anyone could tell the difference in a blind taste test. Additionally, plenty of UHT milk is sold in the refrigerator section, so it's not an aversion to UHT itself. Organic milk is more often UHT pasteurized than non-organic milk and people usually buy organic because they believe it to taste better.
I think there's a very noticeable difference – but you don't have to take my word for it, because lots of research has been done on this subject. For example, see Vazquez-Landaverde, P., Torres, J. & Qian, M. (2006) Quantification of trace volatile sulfur compounds in milk by solid-phase microextraction and gas chromatography-pulsed flame photometric detection, Journal of Dairy Science 89, 2919–2927 – or just search for 'uht milk taste' on Google Scholar.
Yeah, it completely boggles my mind that companies do this. I was selling my old laptop on eBay, and on the desktop and mobile version of the auction page, there were ads for the same model of laptop I was selling at a cheaper price on another site. I guess ad revenue was literally more important than making money off of users selling on their platform.
Interesting how pop-up blockers made their way into browsers years ago, so now they no longer open a new window, but simply display the "pop-up" within the page dom.
Some of these sites might make more money selling ads than selling the actual product depending on their conversion. Just because the site isn't designed for your goal (buying plumbing supplies), doesn't mean it's not making the owner a profit (which is probably their goal).
I make a point of providing what could be considered pointed feedback on their spam-feeding mechanisms formatted as obviously fake-but-valid-looking email addresses. If shortsighted jerks want email addresses, I'll give them some.
What I actually want for this sort of problem is a browser extension that allows me to annotate domains in some way, and then treats links differently based on that. This is a half-baked idea; I have no time to make this, so I haven't been thinking about it much. (Please steal the idea!) But perhaps a way to quickly tag domain names - 'annoying popup', 'spammer', 'dead to me', etc., and then indicate the tags visually next to links/change the colors/something like that, so I can more easily avoid sites that annoy me.
Movie theaters make no money on tickets---it's concessions where the money is. That's why it's $10 for a small bag of popcorn and a drink (which costs the theater pennies on the dollars).
They make plenty of money on ticket sales. Just not much profit on tickets. They still rely on getting the ticket sales money on order to buy the rights to show movies and keep the lights on. They can't just give that up.
I really don't see how. What are the alternatives you envision? Switching to a more expensive service that doesn't show ads but charges a markup? Physically waiting in line at the box office?
Sadly, if "give it away for free and make money from advertising" is the dominant business model in an industry, it's very hard to disrupt. That's precisely because there aren't really any sustainable incentives for users to switch to a different model.
How much do they make per add shown? Is it more than a price difference users would care about, say 50c?
If one experience is awful and one is pleasant but 50c more then most aren't going to notice the difference.
Not to mention the effects on the advertiser, being disrupted from what I'm doing to see your ad makes me not want to see your movie.
For theatre's over reliance on advertising has already turned a lot of people away. We've all made and heard complaints about 20 minutes of advertising before a movie starts. The only thing they've got going for them anymore is timed exclusivity.
All those points could just as easily be used to argue that paid services are a superior business model to ad-supported services in general. Unfortunately, history doesn't bear that out. The revealed preferences of actual customers is different from what you and I think they should want. Just look at an app store.
For what it's worth, I'm with you. I'd rather pay a small fee to avoid ads (and I do so whenever available.) But I've come to the sad conclusion that we are a small minority of consumers. Better to accept that than fall prey to the is-ought fallacy.
It's not really a mistake. It's kinda like how gas stations rarely give you a clear path to drinks or why you needs to wander through produce, cheese and meat (i.e. Margin) to buy milk or bread.
The plumbing guys are dumb, but you don't know the business... of they are a local outfit they have a someone captive audience who can be abused a bit.
> These outfits have lost sight of what their web site is for.
Their web site is for them to make money and considering that these practices exist, I have a feeling that they make more money by ad-sales than by actual sales of their actual product.
Long-term this is obviously a bad strategy, but who knows whether they even are interested in a long-term strategy.
This is why I have stopped reading articles on Washington Post, and other similar article sites. The standard they are creating for the web is not one I can support.
I mentioned a site earlier today which sold plumbing supplies.[1] They pop up a "gimme your email" box which 1) cannot be dismissed, and 2) isn't even theirs, it's from "justuno.com", a spamming service.
These outfits have lost sight of what their web site is for. They're putting obstacles in front of a customer who's about to give them money. This is usually considered a big mistake in retail.
[1] https://www.tushy.me/