End of the year sales, black Friday, Cyber Monday, discounts and other generic names used to attract shoppers and generate more sales. It’s the peak seasons for businesses and exciting time for shoppers to get all the goodies e-commerce sites has to offer says Abdul Fares. Businesses, no doubt are not only making an impactful online presence, but they are also investing in different marketing techniques to stay in the game. Shoppers alike are not left behind. Everyone striving to beat the traffic and take advantage of the sales.  Who doesn’t love a good deal? However, do you know that humans are not the only one generating traffic on your websites? Well, say hello to bots...or malicious bots.

Here is Abdul Fares, the brain behind a reputable e-commerce business, the challenges of automated or bad bots and what they do to your business.

Malicious bots or Bad Bots

Well, not all bots are malicious and there are good ones. Internet robots or simply bots are meant to perform a mundane, simple yet repetitive task says Abdul Fares. They are web spiders that help consumers find the product easily, they relay instant messages and perform lots of other functions, and however, many of these bots are also culprits hindering businesses from making sales as required.

Bad bots are sophisticated and they mimic real human behaviors to disrupt the perfect functioning of the websites and thus, reduce sales.

How did they operate? They disguise as real shoppers, add trendy or limited items to cart, therefore making it unavailable for those that will truly buy it. An in-depth survey of this year peak sales shows that only one-third of the shoppers are genuine ones. So who are the others? You guess right, Bad bots. Moreover, some aims to redirect shoppers to a competitor’s website. Not only that, there are more...

What are the effects of Bad Bots on Retail Ecommerce?

Here are the havoc that bad bots can wreck on your ecommerce business-

Steal the pricing data

One of the main sources of bad bots are competitors who scrap products information and pricing from the websites. The aim is to have a competitive advantage and sell more to the target audience.

Account takeover

Hackers perform identity theft, gain access to a user’s account, engage in fraudulent practices and authorized transactions or shopping.

Scrape prices and product information

Another malicious activity of competitors is to get information on price and product in order to reduce the inventory and prices. Bad bots come in as real shoppers, add products to carts, make it unavailable, and then disappear without checking out. This can reduce sales, conversion rates and overall customer experience.

Moreover, resellers can also scrap product information on limited items in order to make quick purchase for their own store.

Alter website analytics

These malicious bots are poisonous to your websites. Some ecommerce sites claim they have an account of about 90 per cent traffic coming from bots says Abdul Fares. Therefore, making it difficult to differentiate between humans and bots. This impede decision making and business strategies needed for growth are difficult to implement- says Abdul fares.

Businesses periled because of these malicious bots due to the facts that it can go unnoticed. Differentiating it from the goods ones are also very difficult, putting the sites at more risk. Abdul fares advice- “Business should take note of the red flags such as abnormal rise in traffic, slow site loading speed (to mention but a few) and implements bot detection and mitigation measures”.