The Impact of Bad Bots on Ecommerce Industry

One of the biggest spenders on online advertising to attract new customers in the Ecommerce industry. Ecommerce companies spend a lot of amount on organic and inorganic growth to increase the user base and online sales. Ecommerce marketers try to make the best use of sale seasons by offering products at the most competitive prices. The quality of web traffic becomes an essential factor while Ecommerce companies try to scale to the next level.

If you own an ecommerce store, you should also be aware of the challenges from automated web traffic and what it can do to your business. Ecommerce businesses are particularly susceptible to the effects of advanced automated threats, such as price scraping, product matching, checkout fraud, carding fraud, ecommerce scalping, user data theft, account takeover and many more.

Web bots or automated threats are probably the most significant problem that you can face as an online store owner.

Bots may steal product information and prices to give competitors a shopping comparison advantage and may try to buy limited edition items ahead of actual customers to sell them at a higher price. Also, account takeover attack attempt to hack customer accounts for credit card or gift card fraud.

What happens when your ecommerce store is under bot attack?

• Bots can steal your pricing data – Web bots are mostly used for price scraping, which pulls the pricing and product data from your website. Competitors can use this information to determine their pricing, exceeding you and outselling you to your target customers.


• Inventory Exhausting - Bad bots can scrape your inventories and make it unavailable for the real customers. Bots may add hundreds of items to carts and abandon them later to prevent real customers from buying the products. These automated attacks create artificial inventory exhaustion, decrease sales, reduce brand value and skew conversion rates.


• Carding Fraud - Competitors employ bots to test thousands of stolen credit card numbers against merchant's payment processes. Card owners can claim a refund for the fraudulent transaction, that may lead to penalties, chargebacks, and poor merchant history. These activities can ban a merchant from accepting credit cards.


• Ecommerce Scalping - Scalping bots monitor a website for limited availability items such as tickets to a sell-out show or sneakers to buy and resell at a higher price on third-party sites.


• Checkout Fraud - By hoarding a limited availability product, automated bots keep them out of stock, frustrating customers reduces sales and taxes your infrastructure.


• Skewed Website Analytics - Automated bot visits pollute the website traffic and as a result make it challenging to differentiate between human and bot traffic. Eventually misguiding business owners into taking crucial business decisions based on the wrong data.


• Bots can slow down your website speed – Web bots can generate fraudulent, illegitimate traffic to your website, which can ultimately slow down your site’s performance and loading time. This will lead to poor customer satisfaction and may even turn users off from making a purchase.

How InfiSecure can protect your ecommerce website against automated threats?

InfiSecure bot protection is the most accurate solution to detect and mitigate automated bot attacks. InfiSecure provides real-time bot detection and protection technology that blocks web scraping bots and all automated threats before they access your ecommerce website.

• By adopting InfiSecure bot protection solution, your ecommerce website will be protected from automated bot traffic.


• Bot protection will also help in improving website visibility on every major search engines and improve your SEO ranking because your content and prices are now unique.


• InfiSecure Bot protection defends your website against automated bots in real-time and keeps your site protected from all automated threats.


• Protects your ecommerce website from scrapers and hackers that steal user data for generating leads.


• InfiSecure behavioral fingerprinting accurately detects hoarding bots and blocks them in real-time without impacting customer experience.


• InfiSecure behavioral analysis technology defends your website against checkout abuse, carding fraud, account takeover, fake bookings, hacking and other malicious bot attacks.


• Bot protection solution helps in improving bandwidth and reduces the load on the server.


• Faster loading time will make your website perform better and attract more genuine customers to make the purchase.