John Smith From Google - UTM Google Shopper - Creating false abandoned carts

[Michele_Carr]

How do you know that this is that case? I talked to Google Shopping and they denied this practice.

[Garry46]

aga

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@Michele_Carr wrote:

How do you know that this is that case? I talked to Google Shopping and they denied this practice.

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yeah and i've already found correlations with a scam airline service.

not saying were getting abandoned carts from a scam airline service, but this bot used the same fake picture and name. 

[Kyle_Russell1]

Our 'John Smiths' seems to come and go in waves. We won't have anything for a few days and then we'll get hit like this, this was all on Monday:

So apparently Google has denied that this is their Shopping bots causing this?

[Garry46]

I think it's our competitors monitoring our pricing.

Here's a service they might be using to do it:
https://www.pricingbot.co/

[Garry46]

Found a great resource for our bot issue!
We could be looking at OAT-021 Denial of Inventory or OAT-011 Scraping

Found a bunch of articles like this that give little dummy guides to these kinds of issues because they are selling a solution. but i like this one because of this part:

"Threat actors try their best to disguise their bad scraping bots as good ones, such as the ubiquitous Googlebots. DataDome identifies over 1 million hits per day from fake Googlebots on all customer websites."

[guy12]

Hey just wondering if you found any evidence that it was actually pricingbot causing this. That's super sketchy if so, because they also have a Shopify app. Really annoying and Shopify support wasn't much help.

[Garry46]

I don't have much evidence for any specific bot that's doing it. I have a feeling its not pricingbot speicifically, but something less legitimate.

you should also know that from doing some searching around I've noticed that this is not a shopify-specific issue:

https://support.bigcommerce.com/s/question/0D54O00006F86egSAB/false-abandoned-carts-from-bot
https://wordpress.org/support/topic/spam-carts/

[Garry46]

https://benbernardblog.com/web-scraping-and-crawling-are-perfectly-legal-right/

great article

Also a nice little facty image (important to make note that it was made by a company promoting their services):

here's a screenshot from freelancer.com looking for someone to make a program like this:

[ORi2]

sHi Guys 

Any solution for this "John Smith" ?????

[DHDLLC]

I believe it is a way they are using to look through our stores to ensure everything reads and looks according to what they are comfortable advertising. There is no other way to ensure that the information is correct other than our website. You can’t get to the policy in some stores without making it to check out and registering as a customer.

It is super annoying and can throw your conversion off as they sometimes check multiple times in a day making it appear as if you have more traffic then you may. There should be a way to block it and I’m confident Shopify knows how. But ruffling the feathers of their partnership with Google is more important to them then the conversion of the customers who help them make the money they pay Google. So if you get a hold of the ip, block those as they come in.