5 Ways eCommerce Business Owners Could Lose Out to Bad Bots This CYBER MONDAY

Cyber Monday is one of the biggest sale days for online shopping websites. This year it is expected to be the largest ever with sales expected to hit $3.36 billion, representing a 9.4% increase over the year-ago period.

With such huge potential in online shopping, bad bots will be highly active this enormous shopping occasion. In the past decade sales on Cyber Monday has rocketed $610 Million to $3.36 Billion.

Cyber Monday in past years has seen a rise in the fashion industry sales by 50%. This year with 50% more shoe deals on Cyber Monday, sneaker bots are sure to strike. It’s a great time for online shoppers. However, people running the show for e-commerce businesses are always on their toes.

They’ve to make sure that:

1. Their servers can handle the increased shopping activity
2. The network bandwidth has sufficient room to accommodate this spike
3. The product listings are updated and the shopping cart/payment apps are in working order
4. The demand-based, dynamic pricing strategy is closely guarded
5. The user experience stays unaffected
6. The marketing teams are able to derive genuine ROIs from campaigns and the sales see increased conversions

Seriously, there are too many parameters to look into for the smooth functioning of the e-commerce portal, and maximize revenue. But, all of them can be affected singularly or together by bots executed with malicious intents. These bots could be from third-party scrapers or from competitors with the aim of damaging your brand, and/or diverting your user base to their advantage.

Here are some problems bad bots can cause to online shopping websites.

1. Price Scraping

Competitors often steal pricing data from ecommerce/product catalog websites using bots to undercut their prices as a beat-down strategy. Such malicious activities are rampant with the consistent rise in online businesses, especially in this Cyber Monday. Not all bots are created bad. Search engine bots aid your SEO ranking whereas bad bots are sent by competitors to scrape your pricing details.

2. Content Scraping

With shopping websites working around the clock for Cyber Monday, developing content such as product images, description, specifications, product reviews, seller information etc., these are easily scraped, manipulated and posted on competitor/fake websites.

3. Bots used to purchase faster than genuine users

Many tech-savvy/hackers who can program, have a field day by selling their automated shopping bots. With many of them taking to online dark markets selling bots with their own holiday discounts, it is now even cheaper to buy bots online. Bots on the dark market for Cyber Monday range from $10 to $149.

4. Server overload and downtime

Bad bot traffic will overload servers and increase the risk of downtime. This uncontrolled traffic will choke bandwidth and impact genuine user experience. Operational fatigue and workload on IT teams lead to excessive wastage of manual effort and time, not to mention the thousands of dollars in lost sales.

5. Cart abandonment

Millions of bad bots are expected to surge into shopping websites this Monday. Bots will place fake orders on numerous products and restrict genuine users from accessing the website. Many genuine users will be redirected to a out-of-stock page, while the bots fill up ghost carts in a few seconds, only to abandon them at a later stage. 69% is the average cart abandonment rate on e-commerce websites.

With emerging technologies and increasing computing power at affordable rates, illegal activities like content theft and data scraping by bots are on the rise. A majority of the online business owners are still unaware of the dire consequences of this commotion.

Here’s a generic schema that can help protect your online shopping website from bots, this Cyber Monday:

So, how were your Cyber Monday sales last year?

Did you encounter cart abandonment or saw your competition selling similar products at cheaper prices? What did you do then, and what are your plans now?

Originally published at insights.ecommerceexpo.co.uk on November 25, 2016.