shopping cart spammer

[sebastian502]

For about 5 weeks now I have had one person coming to the site directly to a product page, adding one item to the cart, going to checkout using a different email address each time.  This is occurring dozens of time s a day.

What I know is:

• Only adds one item to cart each visit
• Always uses the same name of John Smith
• Email is always a variation of johnsmithxxxx@gmail.com but a different email each time
• address entered is always googles corporate address in California
• Only active between apprx 10:00 am through 2:00 am eastern time.  Always a gap at night
• With the gap at night, maybe indicating an actual person, or just doing that to hide a bot pattern
• Ip address is 72.14.199.0  which comes back as as google registered IP 
• They are removing or not allowing cookies as tracking software assigns a unique id on each visit
• Each time spends 4-8 minutes on the site but only visits landing product page, cart page, checkout page.
• Occurred over 300 times in 3 weeks.  Started slowly with 2 or 3 visits initially and increasing visits each day
• Mostly random products but occasionally an item is repeated.
• No indication they are coming from paid advertising from our internal tracking software and monitoring

A screen shot  below is from part of today.

I've eliminated shopify support doing this due to an open ticket.   Doesn't seem to be trying to click fraud advertising.   Someone mentioned a facebook pixel workaround to test product sales but removed pixel several days ago and no change in behavior.

Any ideas what is occurring and why?  What would be the the end goal to add items to cart?

[EmmanuelFlossie]

If you are using advertising, for example Google Merchant Center, then the review team, will check your products for accuracy. They will add it to the card and view the checkout to see if your shipping price is accurate too.

This is very normal and is not strange.

[Domakis]

I think it is. As long it ruins your cart to checkout rate, abandonment rate and finally conversion rate.

[sebastian502]

It has pretty much made those stats worthless at this point.       It's still occurring and i really don't understand the point even if it is google checking pricing, data accuracy etc to be going on so long.   Everything is totally in line with zero issues showing in google merchant center.  Its not a new store, operating over 20 years.

[Domakis]

I found just one solution so far. Exclude the IP range at least from google analytics and just track your analytics there. + bonus, exclude all other countries which you are not selling on. Sure, there are few apps on Shopify where you can exclude IP's but we don't want to exclude google services completely from our website, right? So it looks like the only solution so far - Use GA for data analysis and use filters in GA to exclude specific IP range ( I guess it should be from 72.14.199.0 to 72.14.199.255).

Btw, maybe you recently applied for Google product reviews on the merchant center?

Best regards,

Domas

[timsamuels1971]

The only problem you will run into is that Google changes the IP Address ranges all the time Like my John Smith right now is IP 66.249.92.54 and 66.249.92.56 But it will change so you constantly have to up date, other then that it seems to be the only option at this point.

[Domakis]

Just try to exclude all range of this IP's... you see, the beginning of the IP is the same. 66.249.x.x

And guys, think out of the box - Why Google should do these totally NOT SMART actions on their customer's websites? :) It's just noobish to ruin people's data.

I don't think this is Google. 

But what I really don't understand why Shopify doesn't take any action?? We can't control or filter any incoming traffic in our stores and it's really not good. Some simple primitive apps will not help to sort out this problem...

[Shop007]

Tried that and the honeypot method. They do not work. Shopify doesn't seem to care as well. 

[Shop007]

Also, this isn't google. It just a bot which uses a google's address as it's billing address.  

[Teeno]

Same here, I see between 10–15 abandonned checkout per day from John Smith. When I export my abandonned checkouts this is total 428 of 615 which equals roughly 70%. Pretty annoying I must admit.