Scalper bots, also known as inventory hoarding bots, are the bots that thrive on supply and demand. These malicious bots are used to target merchandise that is typically in high demand or limited supply, buying it and selling it on for a tidy profit. The key thing here, is that scalper bots can make purchases extraordinarily quickly, much faster than any genuine user can.
No one could have predicted how 2020 would unfold, particularly for the retail industry. While some high street stores, including major brands, have been forced to close, other retailers have navigated surges of consumers heading online and fueling the eCommerce industry like never before. The holiday period is vital for retailers, with trading figures from November to December able to make or break a businesses’ annual profit margin.
Bad bots are disrupting your website performance, reducing performance and speed. Bot activity, both good and bad, affects all industries including retail, online gambling and gaming and streaming. In our blog we discuss the detrimental impact of bots to your website performance and subsequently, the customer experience, with advice for detecting and mitigating bad bot activity.
APIs served as part of web and mobile applications are vital to enabling customers to interact with your business. However, it’s important to understand the impact on your business when these APIs are used in new, non-standard and potentially unintended ways. While APIs are usually written and intended for use with certain frontends (i.e. web application or mobile app), they are served publicly on the internet and are open to inspection by any interested party.
Bots are evolving dramatically and becoming more sophisticated and launching ever more complex and targeted attacks at ever increasing rates. This makes detecting bots more important than ever but also more difficult than ever. Bots of the more recent generations are harder to identify without expert bot detection tooling. These bots could put businesses at risk of exposure to threats such as scraping, carding, and credential stuffing.
Scalper bots, or inventory hoarding bots, are used to disrupt, manipulate, and steal merchandise much faster than any human can. These malicious bots add products to carts, often products that are in high demand or limited supply. This stock is held in a basket and made unavailable to other prospective buyers. Scalper bots perform this process multiple times, causing significant problems for websites and retailers, by hijacking inventory and reselling the items at a higher price.
