The Most Prevalent Bots on Ecommerce Websites

More than half of all web traffic is automated which means that on average every other visit to your web application is non-human. Malicious automated traffic on websites can compromise the security of your web application and result in loss of confidential and site information. The chances are that there are bots on your site right now, but the question is what are they doing and why?

Most common bots in the Ecommerce space are listed below:

1. Search Engine Spiders

Search engine spiders are those who crawl a website such as Googlebot and Bing bot, consuming resource and bandwidth, indexing the pages to learn what they are about to make them more searchable. Search engine spiders are considered favorable for your website as they help you improve your search engine ranking.

2. Price Scrapers

Price scrapers lift off the pricing data from the ecommerce websites along with product catalog information using bots. Price scrapers can have a negative impact on retailers who compete based on price as they give your competitors the information they need to undercut your prices constantly.

3. Card Scammer Bots

Bad actors make use of card scammer bots to generate and submit credit card numbers continuously until they discover a working combination which can be sold or used to make purchases. Failure to protect ecommerce platforms against criminals using card scammer bots can see retailers pick up customer chargeback penalties, lose trust and brand value.

4. Scalper Bots

Malicious bots scoop up limited availability items such as tickets to a sell-out show or sneakers to buy and resell at much higher price on other third-party sites, to prevent sales to your legitimate customers.

5. Inventory Exhausters

Bad bots tasked with buying up the limited stock so that it can be sold at a higher price. These bots damage ecommerce businesses as well as travel and ticketing industries. Reselling their products at inflated prices annoys customers and also repeatedly placing limited stock products into shopping carts so that they appear out of stock makes a customer leave your website and look elsewhere.

6. Gift Card Scammers

Bad actors make use of gift card scammers to obtain goods for free, leaving legitimate customers confused as to why the balance on their gift card is empty. They can check if the store cards are linked to credit cards. If they are, then bad actors will be able to make fraudulent purchases through your customers' account.

Malicious automation would surely have a negative impact on your website and your business. It is always wise to know exactly what is hitting your site and what is the reason, then only you will be able to take the most appropriate action.

Once you can detect bots and identify what they are doing on your website you can start to manage them correctly using a bot mitigation solution.