How to stop abandon cart bots. This worked for me!

Shopify Discussion

Topic summary

An e-commerce store owner identified bot-generated abandoned carts by noticing all suspicious entries used protonmail.com email addresses with legitimate physical addresses but never completed purchases.

Impact on operations:

  • Bots were polluting abandoned cart analytics
  • Interfering with automated Klaviyo email flows

Unexpected solution discovered:
After the site experienced a severe slowdown (LCP count spiked from 1,000–4,000 to 26,000), reverting to an older theme version resolved both the performance issue and eliminated bot activity. The owner suspects the slowdown may have been an attack, though the connection to stopping bots remains unclear.

Immediate workaround implemented:
Added a Klaviyo filter to exclude emails ending with “protonmail.com” from abandoned cart flows.

Current status: Bot activity has ceased since the theme rollback, though the root cause remains uncertain.

Summarized with AI on October 28. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
1

Hi,

I’ve been running my e-commerce store for almost a year now.
As part of my regular analytics work, I started noticing a number of abandoned carts.
After a closer look, I realized they were bots. They were using legitimate addresses, but I could tell from the emails that they all had the same domain name — all of them were using protonmail.com.

They never completed any orders, but it was annoying and started affecting my abandoned cart flow in Klaviyo.

By coincidence — or possibly due to an attack on my site — I’ve discovered a solution that has worked ever since.
A few days ago, my website suddenly became very slow and no customers were able to place orders. This went on for two days and was obviously very frustrating.
I noticed my LCP count jumped from the usual 1,000–4,000 to 26 000 LCP on the day the site slowed down. I hadn’t made any changes or updates to the site, so I still think it might have been some kind of attack?

Anyway, I eventually tried switching to an older theme version, and that made the site work again!
And since then, I haven’t had any abandoned carts from bots.

I’m not sure if this will solve the bot issue for you, but it worked for me! Hope it helps! :slightly_smiling_face:

To keep the bots out of my Klaviyo flow, I added a filter:
and
Email doesn’t end with protonmail.com