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I am currently building a new style ecommerce shopping cart to test various scenarios and get the best conversion rates. Alot of this will be Javascript based.

So I am trying to establish whether we are now in a time where we can simply say we happy to drop support for people with javascript turned off?

Thanks for your help help and advice in advance.

Lizard
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    Why are you asking us? Isn't this a question for 1) the people paying you for this solution, or 2) some company who makes statistics on web users available? It's fine by me to forget about users who don't have Javascript enabled. ;) – jalf Apr 09 '10 at 09:03
  • I never saw such people if they are common users – abatishchev Apr 09 '10 at 09:03
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    Things like the No Script extension are becoming more popular. There are probably more people visiting websites without JS now then any time in the last decade. – Quentin Apr 09 '10 at 09:04
  • This is still a valid question - it's a question of design practice. – Paddy Apr 09 '10 at 10:05
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    There are type of site (primarily complex applications) where requiring JS makes sense. I don't think ecommerce is one of those cases. Remember we are not just talking about people who've disabled JavaScript, we're also talking about UAs where JS isn't up to scratch (eg. shopping by mobile phone), accessibility UAs, browsers on the other site of filtering proxies or dodgy ‘internet security’ tools that mess with scripts, and above all **search engines**. If your product pages aren't accessible to Google you are going to lose a lot of sales. – bobince Apr 09 '10 at 10:39
  • Plus, if the site works without JavaScript, you don't have to worry so much about your scripts breaking on any particular browser, because the site should continue to be functional (if not super-whizzy) without script. If customers are required to use JavaScript to make a purchase, then just one mistake in your scripts or one browser bug and you have lost customers. How confident are you in your scripting capabilities and testing on current, past and future browsers? Do you feel lucky? – bobince Apr 09 '10 at 10:41
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    I agree with @jalf... you have my permission (you can just tell your client that some guy on StackOverflow said it was okay, lol) – Adam Apr 11 '10 at 22:51

9 Answers9

10

Look at your stats!

See how many of your users have javascript enabled, crunch the numbers and decide if you can afford to lose them.

Bryan Oakley
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grapefrukt
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    What if your stats package, e.g. google analytics, requires javascript? – roryf Apr 09 '10 at 09:07
  • then change to a stats package that will measure what you need. even a quick hack to measure it yourself could work, you should be able to get a pretty good picture over a few days of traffic. – grapefrukt Apr 11 '10 at 12:49
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I, as a person who lives happily with Noscript addon for Firefox, advise you to put a warning in a <noscript> tag for us noscripters, telling that your site relies heavily on Javascript. This will do the trick. It is not ok to forget about us, because there are lots of us paranoids out there, but we know how to turn javascript on, so you just need to be gentle with us, and everybody will be happy.

UPD: Just copy the StackOverflow's own <noscript> solution to your site, and it will be enough :)

n1313
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That is a personal/company decision that needs to be made for each specific site based on the target audience.

For example, if you are selling computer hard-ware, chances are you wont have idiots running stupid browsers with stupid settings.

I personally require JavaScript for my backend systems and allow JS degradation on frontends.

Phil Sturgeon
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If this is a public facing site, you should try and have some functionality that works - i.e. it should degrade gracefully. If you have a link that opens up a light window via script, for not script users, it'd be good if that link actually browsed them to a new page - this isn't so hard to do.

Paddy
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I would say the majority of folk nowadays would have it enabled. So its really based on whether you think the minority are worth the effort to develop a non-javascript solution.

James
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People do occasionally have js turned off. From a commercial perspective, you can probably ignore these people, unless for some reason they happen to be highly correlated with your target demographic...

However you should ensure that the basket/functionality/style/design etc degrades nicely in absence of js.

Richard H
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Would a business owner want to turn away 10% of their customers? Or refuse 10% of their potential sales? Or simply throw away %10 of their income?

The answer is an easy NO. This is an ecommerce application and it's goal, because it is the goal of the application's owner, is to make money. Not turn it away.

John Conde
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    Well, it's a bit less cut and dried than you make it sound. If, for example, it costs 12% of your revenue to support that 10% of customers, it's a losing proposition isn't it? Now, whether in the real world it really costs that much is hard to say. If you don't have many customers, maybe. – Bryan Oakley Apr 11 '10 at 22:47
  • We could get into finer points about this as in some circumstances ignoring them would be valid. But based on the criteria put forth in the question (increase conversion rate and it's a system that seems to be intended for use by more then one merchant) and in a majority of cases I think my point is valid. – John Conde Apr 11 '10 at 23:19
  • If a new AJAX-powered one-page checkout excluded 10% of the user base, but doubled the conversion rate among the remaining 90%, you would still see an increase in sales and revenue. – Nick Apr 28 '13 at 17:19
  • But you could still offer it to non-javascript powered devices. **Progress enhancment is not exclusive**. – John Conde Apr 28 '13 at 18:01
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Yes indeed, just like it's ok to leave IE 6 behind.

ripper234
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  • Just like its ok to leave firefox, chroms, ie7, ie8 behind if that user base is not one you care about..... IE6 has a large user base! That won't be changing for a while. – Robin Day Apr 09 '10 at 09:04
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Yes you can ignore those users. The web has always been scriptable and is more so now, and in the near future, than ever before. People who turn js off know what they've done and understand there may be issues with sites because of it. If they know how to turn it off, they know how to turn it back on. Despite all the older articles about this question (and what if they have CSS turned off?), it's just that. From days gone by.

While there may be statistics showing 2%, or 5%, or whatever percent, have js turned off, these are not typical users who visit ecommerce sites on any regular basis and would be surprised if it didn't work for them. It is no longer reasonable for any user to think they can work with such sites without it.

Therefore, with all the ecommerce sites I am contracted for, javascript is considered a given and we have never had any complaints and I never expect any. This is the modern web.

Rob
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