How can we deactivate permalinks to ensure fair customer access?

Technical Q&A
1

Hi, we have a shop with product drops. People try everything to get ahead of the others. So what they do to get to the checkout faster is making their own permalinks. My question is, if there is a way to deactivate permalinks for a shop to prevent customers to get an advantage over the others.

A second question about permalinks is, are they also somehow restricted by a certain amount per shop or can they just be generated unlimited? If so, then why would we use the Storefront API to generate a checkout link (which is restricted to a rate limit) instead of just making our own permalinks on the fly when a user checks out on our website?

2

Shopifys answer to this was:

  1. No, Permalinks can not be deactivated. However Shopify knows what orders came in by the Storefront API and can distinguish those from the one that came directly over a Permalinks.

  2. You could use Permalinks for own drops. There were no numbers shared for the rate limit on that (as it is not over the storefront) however, they stated that it would be more difficult to compare to bots and there wouldn’t be as much protection and also it is not recommended to use Permalinks over the Storefront API.