Cookies Free option to complete purchases - We are ALL losing sales due to Citrus Lime mandatory cookies - and customers keep telling us this!
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Scott Hargrave
Despite our best efforts to explain to our customers why cookies are needed due to the platform we are on we are losing sales and getting bad feedback. We lost a £450 sale today alone because despite my emailing back to the customer and explaining 2 of our 3 cookies are needed to make the site work he went elsewhere and then emailed purchase receipt to us. We get 2-3 of these a week now, and with our average basket value a quick calculation shows this is costing us significant sales across the season.
We have a decent cookies page, we explain carefully why we need these (or citrus lime does!) but it’s not working.
Could we please have the option for customers to continue their purchase without cookies so we can recover some of the ££££ in sales we know we are losing each season?
Am I alone with this issue as I cannot believe we are, and none of our competitors block completion of orders without cookies in place as todays customer kindly showed us!
I understand completely why the cookies are there from a technical point of view but it needs to be reviewed and moved away from as other platforms are perfectly capable of doing this as we are finding and we know some of those competitors are spending a fraction on the website platform!
Thank you for considering and please help upvote this if you agree, trust me though there are still customers who just won’t use a site with cookies and that particular profile of customer is very much our customer :)
Maybe there is an option I am simply not aware of that brings the platform in line with most other e-commerce offerings?
Scott
The Skiers Lounge.
James Steel
Hi Scott
I understand that you went with CookiePro in the end (and this is installed on your project now).
I wonder if, for the benefit of others interested in this post, what the factors were that led you to select this over other providers.
https://www.cookiepro.com/products/cookie-consent/
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Scott Hargrave
James Steel we tried another option first but it caused issues on the website once live, we looked at 4 others but I am turned off as soon as a company says to fill out a form for a quote. I want to know the pricing, I am not buying double glazing or blinds, and there is enough information easily available to give a price these days.
Hope this helps others looking into this. We lost 2 more orders that we know of since we raised this ticket so for us it’s worthwhile.
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Paul Barr
We discussed this situation internally in our organization and the vast majority of us felt that the wording or lack of choice which is posed to customers is the key issue here. We feel that giving customer a choice to "Accept necessary Cookies Only" or "Accept all Cookie" would go a long way to help this issue. We know that cookies are necessary but are also very aware that customers don't like being pushed into a corner and the vast majority of them will not read the Cookies Policy.
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Steven Sproat
But, Google Analytics cookies are set on the site before I press "I accept cookies" - is this correct?
I just visited the skierslongue link below, I then refreshed the page without doing anything and now the GA cookies have been set and then re-sent back on the subsequent request. I didn't accept cookies but now tracking cookies have been set.
Isn't it standard practice to enforce the accepting of essential website cookies (e.g. basket/session/other functionality) (e.g. you can't revoke/reject these) and then opt-into any other third party ones. The 3rd party ones should then only be set upon the user granting consent to do so
(I despite these banners BTW, they've made the web a much poorer experience IMO! I can't visit any site on my phone without first being hit with a popup expaining how the site cares about my privacy 🙄)
Neil McQuillan
Scott,
This is very confusing. We set a cookie which contains only a unique token for the customers (no personal information just a random number) to identify the customer. This is required by all platforms HTTP is stateless which means without a cookie there is no way to link one page loading to another - e.g. there is NO way to logged in or have a basket.
It is possible to pass the token around in the query string or form variables. This is fragile and much less secure as it gets stored in logging software and indeed Google Analytics.
e.g.
https://www.theskierslounge.co.uk/ski-helmets/pgr/smith-glide-jr-mips-ski-helmet-mips-and-rascal-goggles-combo-in-black__4341?
userid=213213
On your own site you look to have added some third party ones so you might want to consider an addin for your users to manage these, but we, other than Google Analytics, only install required cookies which do NOT contain any user specific information or can be read by other sites.
The drawback to this is its insecure as that ID gets stored in our web server logs etc etc.
The only other cookies we set are for similar purposes, they are random tokens for things like load balancers, with the exception of Google Analytics.
If someone is inherently scared of cookies I'm not some what to do, it makes no logical sense.
Cross platform tracking cookies are a whole other issue but all ours are private and other sites cannot read them. Which is why we believe we have this issue covered.
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Scott Hargrave
Neil McQuillan
Hi Neil. It’s not confusing. Let’s take developer and owner hats off for a moment:
Problem: customer wants to make a purchase on our website but can only say yes to cookies a they are given zero choice. Customer goes to another retailer, says no to cookies and is fine making purchase with a reduced experience. Snow and Rock
You have likely shopped at some of these retailers we are competing with and others in the cycle industry who do not have this first stage brick wall for the occasional customer. But these occasional customers still have a value to us and a cost to get them to us.
So for a new visitor to our website who does not want cookies - and these customers are not developers, experienced retailers or tech savvy - they will not buy from us
But a few DO actually take the time to tell us this.
Aside from turning off the cookie banner which is a regulatory requirement I still believe(?) what can citrus lime do to help those customers spend money with me, and all the other CL clients who will have this occurring?
Please get your UX team to set their parameters for a less tech savvy customer or someone who values their privacy and use one of our sites. The issue is pretty clear and losing us ALL sales, not just this whinging old skier :)
Customers need a choice not a my-way-or-the-highway as that has cost us ££££ and I can do nothing to resolve it.
Thanks!
Neil McQuillan
Scott Hargrave ah you can install your own cookie manager, but we can’t do more as each customer has their own cookie setup ( eg our customer, not citrus-lime decide to install services with GTM which set none essential cookies ).
I’ll see if we have any recommendations!
I’ll see how snow and rock do it, maybe they have a completely cookie free system, but that would be less secure and I suspect would lead to more rage for tech savvy users.
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Scott Hargrave
Neil McQuillan thanks I just need a yes/no which then allows a customer to complete a purchase even if the experience is reduced
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Jon Mayo
Scott Hargrave I think you do need a 3rd party cookie manager to allow a customer to finely tune this.
This is exactly what Snow and Rock have (see screen grabs), so you can choose essential "functional" cookies only which would be what Neil refers too to save the session / basket etc only.
We have had feedback from customers too and have resisted adding a cookie service to our site (by asking Citrus Lime to add the code to GTM) mainly as it's a very occasional customer feedback rather than weekly. Of course we may not know about a customer that arrives on site, can't manage their preferences and then leaves and never tells us so you could have a fair point about looking at this again.
In terms of cookie service we'd likely look at someone like https://cookiefirst.com/ as it's low cost and also is a Google Certified CMP partner for Google Consent Mode v2.
This last bit is where all sites will need to manage this if they serve Ads as Google is enforcing getting and recording consent from customers for tracking, I understand it's starting with Chrome and from this month (March 24).
I have a case open for this and I understand Citrus Lime are rolling out changes in the March 24 ecom update but I'm yet to get information on how this will work. Find out more here https://support.google.com/tagmanager/answer/13695607?hl=en
This is relevant to Google ads but maybe Analytics too. I only mention this as you may need to consider this too when thinking about cookies in general, we are and will possibly test using a 3rd party to manage depending on what the ecom update provides.
Hope that's useful and I've understood the thread correctly!
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Scott Hargrave
Jon Mayo yepp thats exactly what we need to do - thanks for the input, just waiting for Neil McQuillan to come back with a suggestion, as I think we could ALL benefit from this option, as there are those that bother to tell us why they are not buying from us, and there is the 99% that dont! it may still only amount to 2-3 orders lost a week, but thats still enough to look at how to overcome this issue as others are doing.
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Scott Hargrave
Jon Mayo Cookie first looks spot on, and was on my list to look at - thoughts Neil McQuillan?
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Jon Mayo
Scott Hargrave Also my PPC agency suggested https://www.cookieyes.com/ as from the suggested Consent Mode V2 list of supported providers this is one of the only ones that is a UK company. Whether you think that is important or not, might be as we're outside the EU so the nuances of the legislation as it applies to the UK could be useful.
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Eoghan Sheehan
Neil McQuillan, Would it be possible to add in brackets (This site uses necessary cookies only) this should allay the fears of many website users who always choose the 'reject' or 'necessary cookie' options before proceeding to use any site they visit. I.e. the Cookie button would read: ''I accept Cookies (This site uses necessary cookies only)''. The debate can go on all day about the pros and cons of cookies and the different levels of understanding and personality types of consumers but this seems like a simple solution / fix to me.
Neil McQuillan
Eoghan Sheehan we only add mandatory and analytics cookies, so covering these is easy. All our mandatory ones I’ve checked are ok with the ICO, the challenge is when our customers add cookies outside our control if we tighten up our messaging the site would be misleading, I’m trying to find a route forwards to square this circle.
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Eoghan Sheehan
Neil McQuillan Hi Neil, that makes sense and thanks for the reply. Is it possible to make that wording change on a site by site basis as that solution would work for us as we haven't added any cookies?
Shirin Sadr
Eoghan Sheehan If you use Analytics and Ads, you dont only use functional cookies.