How to Protect WooCommerce Websites from Bad Bots

Ecommerce protection was never more critical than now. Ecommerce platforms are often an easy target for hackers, bad actors and even for competitors to extract business-critical information. According to global fraud report 2018 published by PAYMNTS and Signifyd, $57.8 Billion was the value of potential fraud in Ecommerce across eight major industries. It is essential to stay protected against potential ecommerce website security threats since most of the web attacks are now made via automated methods. By just being aware of the potential threats that your business might encounter, you will be well prepared to identify types of automated threats. If your ecommerce store is hosted on WooCommerce, then you must be aware of the following ecommerce website automated threats:

1. Price & Content Scraping - Competitors employ price scraping bots to extract real-time pricing intelligence from your site. Competitors also use bad bots to retrieve the original content from your website to refurbish the same on other platforms. Original content takes high cost of development, copying content with slight changes in texts eliminates the cost. Due to content scraping, your website will start ranking lower in search engine results. This will directly impact legitimate traffic on your site as your viewers will redirect to other platforms serving the same content.


2. Account Takeover - Hackers make use of evil bots to steal user login credentials and critical user details. After hijacking user accounts, hackers can access all private data of users, make unauthorized purchases, claim any rewards and get involved in similar frauds. Account takeover cause loss of brand value as the customer’s account gets compromised.


3. Form Spam - Fraudsters use bots to submit forms repeatedly on WooCommerce site to spam the website with fake leads. It could be done to create fake profiles, fake listings, abuse discount coupons and perform other such fraudulent activities that harm your online business.


4. Skewed Analytics - More than half of all web traffic is generated by bots. An effective analytics system needs to differentiate between the human traffic and non-human traffic (bot traffic) and should give details of both types of traffic separately. Website analytics become skewed when it fails to differentiate, bot traffic adds to the genuine human traffic in the metrics. Incorrect metrics leads to wrong marketing decisions.

How to Protect WooCommerce Store from Bot Attacks?

It is unfortunate, but true that fraudulent activities are harmful to a large sector of Ecommerce industry. When a fraudulent transaction is made via your store, it is essential to act immediately as to ensure your customers are not impacted.

You need to have an accurate solution for bot protection, as advanced persistent bots can even bypass CAPTCHA test and other security measures by mimicking human behavior. InfiSecure’s bot protection service works as a safeguard to your WooCommerce store by detecting advanced persistent bots in real time and blocking before they harm your business.

InfiSecure uses advanced technologies such as user behavior analysis, IP behavior analysis, centralized intelligence, known violators testing, device fingerprinting and machine algorithms to identify and block sophisticated persistent bots. It provides continuous protection against malicious bots and keeps your WooCommerce store secured.

Benefits of Using InfiSecure Bot Protection Service

1. Scraping Protection for WooCommerce Websites - InfiSecure detects scraper bots and blocks them in real-time before they copy your prices or content.


2. Account Takeover Prevention for WooCommerce Websites – InfiSecure’s WooCommerce bot protection plugin offers special protection against account takeover, on top of the scraping protection. It detects brute force attacks at runtime and disables the bots used for such attacks.


3. Form Spam Prevention for WooCommerce Websites - InfiSecure stops bot submissions on forms, this eliminates automated form filling and submissions, fake listing creations, fake profile submissions and other fraud activities.


4. Skewed Analytics Prevention for WooCommerce Websites - By using real-time bot detection, classification and blocking, InfiSecure keeps your website free from bad bot traffic. This helps you understand your actual website metrics, and to make better decisions to have more meaningful marketing strategies.

So, there you have it! Deploying InfiSecure’s bot protection service to your WooCommerce website means a safer shopping experience for your customers.