4% my visitors won't accept cookies

is this normal?

[jamie]

hi,

i have been measuring the cookie acceptance of our online shop visitors and roughly 4% of them don't accept our cookies.

our cookies are first party and accompanied by a w3c full and compact privacy policy, yet still 4% aren't accepted.

does this sound about standard?

many thanks

[Herath]

Did you check the agents on these? some mini browsers (i.e mobile phones) arn't cookie friendly.

[jamie]

i didn't think of that, good suggestion.

any idea what general levels might be or where i could find this out?

[jwolthuis]

This is an interesting thread, because (a) I'm one of the 4% who won't accept 1st party cookies by default, and (b) my cart won't function correctly without my customer accepting that cookie.

I don't have any data on cookie acceptance, but 4% doesn't surprise me. These are probably potential customers who have a certain disdain for getting cookied-up the very instant they touch a web site. I question the impact of mobile phones; unless your widgets are geared toward that market.

I'm curious if you've done anything to accomodate non-robot visitors who refuse the cookie. Do you imbed a session ID into the URL? Are there any good alternatives besides issuing cookies to non-robot visitors?

[ecommerceprofit]

Yep, session ids will solve this problem - that's what we do

[minnapple]

jamie

4%: thanks for the data I like to get all I can.

My opinion is that if someone really wants to purchase the product and they knew enough to turn cookies off, they will allow cookies for the purchase.

So the percent of blocked buyers should fall lower.

Let's say 3.5% can't or will not purchase because of the cookie thing.

Consider what it would take you in cost [$] to get out off the cookie environment and calculate how long it would take that extra 3.5% after net sales to break even.

[lbft]

Passing session IDs in URLs comes with a significant security risk - if someone else gets that URL, then they can pretend to be your user.

That means you have to be careful not to have session IDs showing up as referers, ensure that visitors don't pass around your links, etc. or come up with some method of checking that the session does actually belong to that person (and you can't easily use IP addresses, because of ISPs like AOL whose customers may hit different proxies on different page loads, and hence appear to have a different IP to your server.)

[jamie]

minapple,

i see what you mean about calculating the cost:

i've just done some rough maths and this could result in 4 extra orders per day.

this would be well worth it.

however this does mean using sessions, which i am not totally familiar with; and i have often read about the pitfalls mentioned by lbft.

for the stats box:
our demograph is 18-35, western european, primarily UK.

many thanks for feedback all