Bots are creating big problems for retailers, as online fraud surges. Our latest report, Protecting brand and revenue, explores how we can stamp this out.
More and more it seems that, as new technology emerges, so does the techniques that criminals use to cause harm to your business. For every emerging new software that promises to revolutionise how we sell, there’s a new threat that online retails have to navigate.
The threat of the day is scraper bots – sophisticated programmes designed to trawl your site, and harvest any and all data they can get their hands on.
This is causing big problems for retailers. Retail Gazette’s recent Protecting Brand and Revenue report, created alongside our partners at cloud software company Akamai, found that scraping, loyalty and payment card fraud surged an eye-watering 700% in the second half of 2023.
Of course, not all scraper bots are potential threats. Some are designed to look for SEO, and can help promote your site in search rankings and discoverability. Yet, this accounts for just a small volume of the scraper bots combing your site. The rest abuse the data they find to undercut your pricing, scalp limited inventory and steal customers’ information.
Make no mistake, ignoring the threat of nefarious scalper bots will lead to potentially irreparable damage further down the line when your own, or your customers’, sensitive information is laid bare to criminals.
What impact are bots having on retailers?
The most obvious outcome of these bot activities is financial damage to retailers. In short, they cost retailers money. One recent study found that merchants incur an average cost of $3 for every $1 of fraud.
The latest figures from 2023 indicate that the total cost of ecommerce fraud globally exceeds $48bn (£37.3bn), up from $41 bn (£31.8bn) in 2022. This trend means that cumulative losses to online payment fraud globally will climb to over $343bn (£266.7bn). To put this in perspective, that’s more than three times Apple’s net income in 2023.
Another area that takes a major hit is website performance, a retailer’s window to the world. Bots performing scraping or inventory hoarding can overload a retailer’s website infrastructure, leading to slower load times, increased server costs and even site outages.
This degradation in performance directly impacts user engagement, as customers faced with slow-loading pages or downtime are likely to abandon the site, potentially turning to competitors.
How can you stop the bots?
It’s no surprise that different teams are usually focused on protecting different outcomes: security protects data, marketing protects revenue, IT protects against outages, CX protects the customer path to purchase. But these teams have several challenges to tackle:
- Are they communicating and on the same page about shared business outcomes and goals?
- Can they answer the question: ‘Are stakeholders aligned on the technical requirements and tools to protect customer data, the brand and revenue?’
For solutions to these key questions, look no further than the brand-new report from Retail Gazette and Akami, Protecting brand and revenue: Reducing bots and abuse across the customer journey. Click here to download now, and get in the know.
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