Online business has many strategies that help it grow. These strategies comprise of various factors such as SEO, UI & UX, content, payment gateways and bots. Bots are an integral part of online business. They can help your e-commerce website in myriad ways that include generating leads/traffic, preventing cart abandonments, assisting the customers and more. Bots can also help you find and fix errors in your website that result in the decline of sales.
Bots seem like a great idea but just like a bad apple in a basket that affects the other apples, bots can go rogue too. It has been recently discovered that some bad bots have been up to malicious activities like leaking data, misleading visitors, hi-jacking accounts, abusing gift cards, etc. Incidents like these can be harmful to business and can also lead to a bad reputation.
Bad bots make up to 17.7 percent of all e-commerce site traffic; whereas good bots are only 13.1 and the larger share of traffic i.e. 69.2 percent is generated organically by humans. These stats we presented by Imperva’s Bot Management threat research team (formerly Distil Research Lab) in their How Bots Affect E-commerce report.
The reports also state that the vast majority of bad bots i.e. 63.6 percent, originated from a U.S. source with Germany at 18 percent, and France, six percent, being next in line. The majority of these bots are not criminal, rather their focus is on getting the competitive edge.
Imperva reported, these bad bots can affect your business by scraping the prices and product information, while others check inventory, deny inventory activities, scalping, customer account takeover, gift card abuse, spam comments and transaction fraud. In addition to obtaining unauthorized information, these large numbers of bots can slow down sites causing customer dissatisfaction.
Tiffany Olson Kleemann, VP of Bot Management at Imperva said, “This study shows that bad bots cause round-the-clock damage on e-commerce websites, APIs and mobile apps,” she also added “Online retailers must also practice good web security hygiene and take advantage of the technology solutions at their disposal to protect their websites and customers. Gaining a granular understanding of bot threats is a critical first step in the right direction.”
Imperva’s report claims that these bots were sent from:
- Competitors which scrap product prices and check inventory.
- Investment companies which are interested in product pricing, discounts offered and delivery fees.
- Resellers which may instantly purchase in-demand items for their store along with scraping product details.
- Criminals looking to take over accounts, conduct credit and loyalty card fraud and abuse gift cards.
Imperva’s comprehensive report is truly an eye-opener for online businesses. Many brands fall prey to these bad bots and suffer massively while being unaware of the actual reason. FinPlus experts can help you manage your e-commerce websites and also fish out the bad bots preying on your business. To save yourself from sinking you can contact us by clicking on this link or message us on WhatsApp.
