Hello, for the past month I have had multiple bots per day adding low item products (usually socks) to their cart. All of these bots are from America and abandon there carts.
Someone please help me resolve this! I already have reCAPTCA turned on.
AI-generated summary
A store owner reports daily bot activity adding low-priced items, especially socks, to carts and abandoning checkout despite reCAPTCHA being enabled. Respondents explain that reCAPTCHA often does not stop cart or checkout automation, especially if bots bypass normal browsing flows.
Suggested mitigations include switching from one-page to three-page checkout, temporarily disabling abandoned checkout emails to protect email reputation, hiding or republishing targeted low-cost products with new URLs/names, blocking repeated IPs if identifiable, setting minimum cart values, and adding extra checkout validation.
Others note the behavior resembles card-testing attempts using cheap products, and recommend enabling stricter payment checks such as CVV and AVS verification. A third-party Shopify app was also suggested as a possible solution using a decoy product to detect and block automated checkout activity.
No final resolution is reported; the issue remains open with several troubleshooting options proposed.
The challenge is that the Bots can use tools to skip directly into the checkout flow.
Have you tried the “Three-Page” checkout? One-page checkouts are much easier for Bot farms to automate.
If you are getting a burst of these right now, you can temporarily disable your “Abandoned Checkout” emails to protect your domain reputation.
You could try unpublishing your “socks” (or lowest-priced items) and re-publish them with a different URL handle and a different name. The idea here is that it can break simpler Bots that “hardcode” product URLs. This is temporary.
If you have not done so already, you can enable hard payment checks for credit card CVV and also AVS checks. Many of the payment providers support this including Shop payments. This will help protect from payment fraud (stolen cards etc.)
Finally, the Shopify app store marketplace there are 3rd party apps that may be able to help.
Hopefully this helps!
This is kinda common and also annoying and reCAPTCHA normally can protects login, check out not cart actions. Since you mentioned that these bots are from US only, you can check analytics to see if they come from same IP, if yes you can simply block IP to prevent them from coming back, visiting your site. Bots often target low ticket products so you can consider hiding these product temporarily (ofc if it doesn’t affect your rev dramatically). Another way to consider is to set minimum cart value or add checkout validation step that asks customer to check a box one more time before proceeding to check out. Also check your abandoned cart email flow, turn it off for a while if needed.
This sounds a lot like the bot/card-testing behavior we’ve dealt with before. The low-priced products are usually the giveaway. reCAPTCHA unfortunately doesn’t stop everything because a lot of these bots can interact with Shopify without browsing the store like a normal customer.
Definitely keep an eye on your abandoned checkouts and whether they’re repeatedly targeting the same cheap products.
We actually built Halt originally to deal with this problem on stores we work with, and recently released it publicly on the Shopify App Store. It uses a decoy product to catch this type of automated checkout activity and block it before the bot can get to the card-testing stage.
Might be worth trying if this is still happening. Happy to answer any questions about how it works too.