Remember if they are automating content copying then you can put whatever you want in your content copy that will show on their site.
There was a thread complaining about the Honey service scraping discounts so one merchant started making discount codes like “HONEY-STEALS-YOUR-DATA”
Water mark your images, brand your videos, and product copy.
Such as making sure your website or business name is everywhere and spelled or used in so many different ways that they can’t just find-and-replace a single simple word.
The thing to note here is that a business has to create value through effort of differentiating their content in such a way that someone copying it doesn’t matter, viewers can still trace it back to the source company.
Other tactics using tags may be an option as shady websites often get on lists that browsers and other services use to turn javascript off making tags show to users.
If they are replicating the area as well then using meta refresh tags inside noscripts with HTML5 to just send visitors to your site
The same goes for if they are replicating the javascript as is, just put in logic to check the location and redirect , you’d want to use some other logic so the copycat’s don’t see the counterattack if they just test the site. If they are using shopify try and make it so when a product is getting added to a cart it it redirects and sets it to your businesses cart.
Seems to me that it would be in Shopify’s best interest to prevent others from illegally accessing their code and well as ours.
It’s in shopifys interest that merchants store are open and accessible to customers on the internet.
By what measure would you think something is “illegally accessing”? If your website is on the internet and public it’s accessible this is very binary concept and pretty much every “solution” to try and counter that basic concept has drastic consequences on every single regular visitor(read will lose you revenue).
Would you rather potential customers can’t find and access your site at all?
If a merchants want protected content then they need to content gate the entirety of a website such as by requiring customer accounts in advance, or using an app like locksmith.
Even then bad actors will still copycat sites.
If your a digital content business, such as writing unique articles, for selling content to customers then seek out plagarism or DMCA services.
If your not in content creation and just sell physical products then focus on creating value to make content copycats irrelevant so it doesn’t even matter if a product description or collection is copied.
As you mentioned users can be blocked by IP addresses
IP addresses change and false positives cost revenue and punish regular customers and merchants.
Shopify has abuse mechanisms in place for spam, DDOS,etc but there is very little to be done against a small site being web scraped.
In short, the hacker will have the weigh the effort of hacking to gain
There is no “hacking” they literally just run a tool to get pages and assets ,as easy as you open a browser tab visiting any website and viewing the source(ctrl+U)
On the internet you can either have perfect security with no access , or allow access with imperfect security.
I wonder what happens to a ShopifyPlus customer who is paying at least 2000/mon for the privilege and their site is scraped
Healthy enterprise businesses just send it to their lawyers to handle the copyright infringement and move on to focus on more important matters of value.
All the flawed prevention in the world will not stop Copycats and especially wont stop those seeking to replicate success.
So what if they ctrl+c&ctrl+v ,or have a bot do it? Is the business so surface thin that a highschooler with an afternoon can replicate the business model and infrastructure itself?
Do they have the vendor relationships? Customer support infrastructure? Volume inventory? Shipping Logistics? Unique marketing materials(email,video,instagram,etc)? Aggressive pricing? etc etc etc
Everytime I’ve seen these types of conversations they are always just distractions that focus on imitators instead of focusing on building out actual value in the business.
Either send to your lawyer handle it, hire a DMCA service, or Ignore them and create actual value that cannot be gotten with every person on the planet with ctrl+c.