Managing and Mitigating Bots

Chapter 6. Checkout Abuse

Checkout abuse is when automated traffic looks to bypass or in other ways manipulate the checkout process on ecommerce sites to gain personal or business advantage. This will involve automating the process of interacting with website ecommerce processes, such as adding to baskets and completing checkout processes. As these processes vary from site to site the process has to be created and implemented for each site targeted.

These are segmented from credit card abuse bots because these are activities that are not, in themselves, aimed to defraud the website owner (that is not to say that they are not violating some legal restrictions or terms and conditions of the website).

Good or Bad?

From a business point of view, most prominent examples of checkout abuse could be seen as positive as they will effectively complete sales quickly and efficiently (this is assuming that the purchase is completed using valid and legal payment means). Large amounts of checkout abuse can result in much higher throughput of sales for high-demand items.

The negative side of checkout abuse can primarily be judged by the impact that it has on other users and therefore the negative brand damage that can be associated with this. There is often customer backlash, which is then picked up by the media, when items are sold out in very short periods of time to non-human traffic, especially as those items are often made available for sale via re-sale sites for vastly marked up prices. ...