All things Shopify and commerce
I am using Google Shopper to push our products from Shopify store into Google Shopper. Google Shopper seems to have a bot that constantly crawls our products, adds an item to a cart, goes to check out and creates an account variant of "John Smith" - johnsmith+1222@gmail.com or some other number.
Shopify doesn't track user-agent or IP address for abandoned orders. So I installed 3rd part apps to discover and found the IP addresses all belong to the Google IP allocation.
It's frustrating as this is creating many abandoned carts which throw off the statistics and analytics for the site, creating accounts, kicks off automation scripts, etc, etc, etc.
Does anyone else have this issue?
-Ingram
Yes! I've been experiencing the same thing. It's incredibly frustrating. I reported it to Shopify customer service and here is their response:
And with regards to John Smith, I spoke to my Team and because these orders are abandoned carts, there's nothing that is happening that is currently negatively harming your shop, but you could definitely look into blocking his IP address. I believe you'd be able to track his IP using Google Analytics and then use a tool like Traffic Guard to block or this app here seems to track & give the option to block as well, IP Log.
No very helpful. If you figure out a way to combat this, please let me know.
Any luck addressing this? We are having the same issue.
What's the latest on this? I have a client for whom this is a material issue.
I've got this too....anyone got any ideas what this is? Is is harmful?
I had the same problem when I ran a giveaway. A Mark Mustermann with an email address of fake10349 at fakemail.com and a Google address of
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway First floor, mountain view, California, United States, 94043. He entered my giveaway over 25 times throwing everything off. I had to go through and manually remove him from my email list. I even noted on the giveaway that it could be entered only once per person. I noticed today he was back and left his information again. He changes the number series in the email so it is different every time. It is very frustrating and with Klaviyo they charge me by the profile, so a bunch of junk profiles increases my bill. Do you think if I reach out to Google they will do anything? |
I tried to contact Google One who said they could not help me but gave me this link to ask for help. I guess I'll see if they really help or pass the buck.
https://support.google.com/domains/gethelp
I have the same issue. Any update on this? This is really bad.
Yup, same problem here. For us it started on Nov 11, 2019 and since then we've gotten 206 abandoned carts from "John Smith", address
John Smith
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
mountain view CA 94043
United States
(650) 253-0000
which is the GooglePlex address and one of Google's support phone numbers and the email address is always some variation of:
johnsmithus65@gmail.com
johnsmithus20@gmail.com
johnsmith.us82@gmail.com
johnsmith.us5@gmail.com
john.smith.us50@gmail.com
Unfortunately, I don't think we as shop owners have any way to combat it without some back-end help from Shopify. I'd love to be wrong though so if anyone has a fix, I'm all ears!
Come on Shopify! Look how many people are having this issue. Must be a way to block it.
All of the abandoned carts in Shopify are mildly annoying, but I don't think they are harming our store.
However, we use Klaviyo as our ESP. Every abandoned cart becomes a profile in Klaviyo and also receives an abandoned cart email sequence. This is causing harm in two ways:
Does anyone know WHY these abandoned carts are created? Is it legitimate Googlebot traffic? I have read that it could be Google automatically verifying that shipping costs in your store match what is submitted through Google Merchant Center.
They definitely skew our statistics regarding abandoned carts and "Customer numbers". We have had trouble with this for the past year. Shopify will not help. They keep giving links to apps that do not address the problem.
Here is something you should put into your Terms and Conditions page which we have in our bulleted list and update your last revision date. If google visits our site and then repeatedly does this it will be on record that they are breaking our Terms and Conditions as of that date and thereafter.
When you use the Web Site or mobile applications, you may not:
Great idea! I’ve just added that to my site and it is live now in the terms and service page. Thanks for the suggestion.
Same issue on my store. Anyone figured out how to deal with it yet?
alright, so my store has caught the john smith bug as well.
Despite his customer info all pointing towards google, this bot has nothing to do with google.
I performed a reverse image search to see if I could trace it back to anything that might tell us anything about what's going on. I found some interesting results.
First of all, surprise-surprise, that image was taken from an actual person that exists online and is probably completely unaware. I may pick up one of his books after this.
The interesting thing that I found was a quora.com user account associated with the same image as "john smith".
This account responds to people on Quora about airline related things in order to promote its scam airline ticket site. I looked flightschannel up on bbb.org. There is an LLC filed, but the operation uses a forwarding address in Nevada as it's company address. Also, according to most reviews online, its a bait and switch scam with foreign accents.
Conclusion:
John Smith is not Google. If its the same scammers as flightschannel.com, the are probably working outside of the US despite my Shopify store not detecting a VPN. It is possible that the same AI is being used by different people, though. Either way, would appreciate a fix.
Yes! This is the detective work we need.
Someone mentioned their Klaviyo account and customer numbers. We have Klaviyo as well. Although it is a pain, we can go in and remove all the John Smith customers.
Here is something I am wondering about however. How is this "person" getting to our stores? Is it possible that there is PPC fraud going on here? a click or 2 to get to our store is one thing, but hundreds of clicks adds up to a chunk of change down the drain.
Is there a way to find out if these visits are coming to us through PPC? If so, I would think Google would want to get involved in this.
I'm not sure if it's PPC fraud because they never arrive there from google.
According to Lucky Orange they arrived there from "direct link", whereas others such as the non-john-smith examples in that screenshot arrived via google ppc.
its 1 million percent google. you run pla ads or smarts or PM ads. yeah !
so they check the delivery costs and the offers in place are actually in place.
its Google.
It's not fraud. It is a Google shopping. What they are doing is testing that your shipping rates match what is in your google shopping feed.
the reasons they do this is some unscrupulous companies will put free shipping in their shopping feed, to make them rank higher in google shopping but in actuality charge customers for shipping.
Once Google catches them doing this they block the products or the entire feed from google shopping.
The "John Smith" bot is adding parts to your cart to see your shipping charges. There is no other way to know the actual charges that a customer would pay.
How do you know that this is that case? I talked to Google Shopping and they denied this practice.
aga
@Michele_Carr wrote:How do you know that this is that case? I talked to Google Shopping and they denied this practice.
yeah and i've already found correlations with a scam airline service.
not saying were getting abandoned carts from a scam airline service, but this bot used the same fake picture and name.
This was our first thought as well, but can you verify this info?
I'd like to block the user, but only if it will not interfere with Google verifying our products.
If this is the case wouldn't a few of these abandoned carts be sufficient rather than 100's of them????
It's Google. I am trying to find out why they're doing it.
Address | 1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy Mountain View CA 94043-1351 Address Verified (AS01) No mail delivery (AS17) |
Property Information | Owner: Google Inc |
MAK (Melissa Address Key) | 2631048415 Personator Search by MAK |
Lat. & Long. | 37.422035 -122.084345 Geocoded to Rooftop Level (GS05) |
Address Type | Business |
Postal Carrier Route | C909 (DPC: 00-0 ) Map |
any updates? I wonder if we are all in similar industries...
There must be a reasoning behind this and I'm sure it's not good for us somehow.
Do you happen to have an IP address for him, he has hit me twice and I would like to use your method and block him. BTW for some reason sales drop for 3 days after he does his cart abandonment crap.
Steve
It's not a person who's doing it. It's a generic placeholder email that Google shopping is putting through. It's an annoyance but it's not affecting your sales.
Nobody is shrugging it off. Just stating facts that it's not affecting your actual sales as someone has eluded to.
Its not about the sales, or not only about the sales. The metrics need to be accurate and right now we’re getting unreal traffic and abandoned carts shoved down our throats. Is there not a way that Shopify can run this metric for google on an offline db and send it to them? There have to be backups of or stores which can be used for this. If Shopify can trust google to poll their network, then google should be able to trust Shopify to submit the necessary data.
We received a message from this person/bot through our contact form asking us where our store is located. Should I reply?
Consider treating everyone as a legit customer.
It is Dave, I have 3 shopify stores and my friends own 8, everyone of them have seen a drop in sales after he visits the sites, this is not just a pipe dream I'm making up. Also I don't believe it's google doing this.
If you list things in Google Shopping you DO NOT want to block these IP addresses. If that is the way Google is validating your items...and if they are blocked from doing so...I suspect you won't show up in Google Shopping any longer and may actually get banned.
BTW...has anyone else on this forum been contacted by Wall Street Journal about this situation? It is not just a Shopify store problem. It is pervasive enough that it came to the attention of a WSJ reporter who is doing an investigative piece about it...
Hello everyone. Google Shopping Specialist here.
First I want to say, this is indeed another thing we all need to adapt to and make changes to our tracking systems. And in some cases this is causing extra costs, which is very sad.
The reason I am posting here is that I want to inform you to not try to block the bots. Blocking the bots will cause your products to get disapproved or worse your Google Merchant Center account getting suspended. The reason is that blocking users or bots will be a policy violation as per below link.
Quote: Make sure your landing pages always match your products. Show a product on your landing page that is essentially identical to the product in your product data, regardless of the user’s device, browser, location, cookies, your ad targeting choices, or any other consideration.
Reference: https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/4752265?hl=en
It is talking about the landing page, but this is also for the checkout.
I'm not saying that you should just let Google cause havoc to your business, I am only replying to avoid you from getting suspended, which is more serious.
Talk to your partners and Shopify to resolve the tracking issues that it is causing. I can see there are already very helpful answers!
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