Sites like Amazon worked flawlessly, while Walmart and Target crashed and burned. Crystal isn't the only content blocker that stops users from buying stuff.Īnother ad blocking app featured in the top paid charts, Purify Blocker, while offering more options (like whitelisting sites) had nearly the identical effect on the shopping sites. Buying a Nexus device on the Google store seemed to be going well until it was time to check out and everything came to a screeching halt because you can't get to the cart. Macy's worked but also loaded a survey pop-up. Target on the other hand wouldn't load individual product pages or the cart. Mega-site Allibaba worked great as did Amazon. worked, but we were presented with a pop to take a survey which seems like the kind of thing Crystal should block. worked just fine and I almost ended up with a new shredder. But it wasn't the only ecommerce site to keep plugging along ready to take your money even with an ad blocker installed. So, we decided to test some more online shops to how much commerce is being thwarted by a hatred of ads.Īs expected the online Apple store worked flawlessly.
But, during our test, we were still unable to get to some product pages on to load. After they informed him about what was happening, he said he would remove the sites from a blacklist. Fortune talked to the developer of Crystal, an app that's messing with some shopping sites. But the side effect of at least a few of these apps is that it screws up shopping on the online versions of Sears and Walmart. To combat some of that and to speed up page loads Apple introduced a Content Blocker feature for mobile Safari that allows third-party developers to create extensions that are "a fast and efficient way to block cookies, images, resources, pop-ups, and other content." Apparently people really hate advertisements on the internet because ad blockers have rocketed to the top of the paid app section of the App Store. But they can also be intrusive and with some of the tracking abilities available out there, a bit creepy. Ads pay the bills for a lot of sites (including this one).