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Sears Site Upgrade Inadvertently Bans All Who Don’t Accept Cookies
“The most surprising thing about the discovery of the problem was that it happened by a vendor, not by anyone on [Sears’] customer service team, or anyone internal who had different settings on PCs at home,” she said.
Further complicating the Sears cookie problem is the fact that the errors greeting consumers—at least in the major Windows browsers—don’t go out of their way to point to cookie-blocking being the problem. On Firefox, for example, consumers are told “The page isn’t redirecting properly” and “Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete.”
Only in the third line—and in a decidedly smaller font/typeface—does the message mention “this problem can sometimes be caused by disabling or refusing to accept cookies.
The resultant Safari error page doesn’t even mention cookies. “Safari can’t open the page.” It then adds, “too many redirects occurred trying to open [Sears.com]. This might occur if you open a page that is redirected to open another page, which is then redirected to open the original page.”
Google Chrome says the page “has a redirect loop” and later mentions—again, in a smaller font/typeface—that allowing third-party cookies could help. Internet Explorer offers the shortest—and least helpful—message, with a succinct “Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage.”
Opera’s error says “Redirection Status” and directs site visitors to click on a specific Sears link that it displays and then helpfully toggles back and forth between various links before eventually giving up and showing the original error page again.
The problem with Sears started generating some “page down” reports from some Web tracking firms, including Pingdom, and some Web site services also reported the site down, such as the wonderfully named http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/.
Sears representatives confirmed its site now blocks cookie-blocking customers and said it was not intentional, but an accidental side effect of the new site changes.
Pingdom was the first to discover the problem. “Sears’ new site implementation sets a cookie and performs a redirect, and the target demands that this cookie is still there,” said Pingdom Web Analyst Peter Alguacil. “Thus, infinite redirects, over and over again as we test their site–because they keep looking for that cookie and sending us back to the beginning when it isn’t there” was the issue.
The divisional VP of PR for Sears, Tom Aiello, stressed the advantages of shopping with cookies activated, saying it allows for “a more feature-rich experience” because it’s easier for consumers to save preferences. Still, he added that Sears is “quickly working on alternative solutions” for customers who happen to block cookies.
-Marc
September 12th, 2010 at 10:15 pm
It would have never crossed my mind either. Not until people started complaining I guess. People still block cookies?
K Bishop
September 14th, 2010 at 5:08 pm
Blocking cookies is very rare among non-techies. And any techie who does block them deals with warnings like these all the time from various sites, so they’re hardly disenfranchised. They’re barely inconvenienced.
This “news” is pretty much a non-event, except to show that system readiness testing has to encompass a much broader range of scenarios than most web admins wants to imagine.
September 14th, 2010 at 6:15 pm
It depends on what you define as rare, with figures ranging from 1.2 percent to as much as 3 percent, in the U.S. So, yes, from a statistical perspective, 97 percent to almost 99 percent will not be impacted, as the story clearly said. But 1.2 percent to 3 percent of all U.S.l shoppers is still a heck of a lot of people. Privacy concerns are pushing a lot more consumers to boost the privacy restrictions on their browsers and firewalls, without necessarily understanding the implications. Don’t be so certain that it’s as rare as you think.
September 24th, 2010 at 3:24 pm
I block most cookies and use the pop-up feature to indicate when a site tries to send me a cookie. I will normally accept 2 cookies from a site. (I wish there was a setting for this) but when I go to a site that tries to put 72 cookies on my site, it gets totally blocked. Same with a site that tries to install 10 cookies when the page opens.
My kids get taught about cookies and tracking. My wife gets upset with the information that some sites try to gather.
Don’t forget flash cookies and the latest, the evercookie.
http://samy.pl/evercookie/
November 22nd, 2010 at 3:24 pm
using firefox I have Noscript, PRequestPolicy, AdBlocker, BetterPrivacy plugins which aid in telling me several things:
A) Where a site attempts to gather ad data from
B) what other sites are being pointed to within a page
C) Allows me to stop all downloading and contacting of those sites unless explicitly temporarily enabling them to contact me.
When I land on a site with more than 10 Advertizing domains in its frontpage I tend to not stay there very long.
When a site has only itself as a domain and useful information then I do tend to stay to find out what the site has to say since it is not making money by my being there.
Websites you need to get with the grips that Cookies are a security risk.
Cookies have been dangerous since 1995 and beyond and we all know why we clear our cookies and clean up that 20gb of “stored” data from surfing the web on our computers.
Those who are smart do the best they can to prevent themselves being targets of dangerous, malicious, or unscrupulous privacy invasions.
However we cant train everyone to be security conscious and we cant have everyone always being Ultra-paranoid secure. If we did then whats the point of having the internet because the only security from the internet is to be disconnected from it.