Stopping Bots: The Key to a Successful Product Drop

Dropping a product with a limited supply is the perfect opportunity to build hype around your brand, let your most loyal customers show their appreciation, and make a decent profit.

Your next launch is going to sell out. You know it.  Your customers know it. But unfortunately, scalpers know it too.

With all the work that goes into a product drop, the last thing you need is your busiest sales day of the quarter turning into a PR nightmare as your loyal customers are given no choice but to purchase your product from a third-party at an inflated price.

And how does that happen?

Bot traffic.

What is bot traffic?

Bot traffic describes any non-human visits to your website. If you review site visits, you might spot small (or large) spikes in traffic that come at completely random times. These are usually harmless – search engines like Google and Bing will use bots to scan your site and decide where it is listed on search results pages, but bot traffic on a large scale can begin to cause issues for your website’s normal visitors.

Did you know, almost 50% of all traffic on the internet is bots? And that’s only been increasing over the last few years.

Your mind might jump to DDoS attacks: millions of bots hitting your site all at once causing crashes or delays on your website. But during a product drop, you’re much more likely to see a different type of problematic bot traffic: scalpers.

How can bot traffic affect your product drop?

If you know your product is going to sell out, why would you care who buys it?

They’ll all be paying the same price anyway – so what’s the problem?

Scalpers are only there to use bots to make money from your fans. To ride the coattails of your popularity and squeeze as much as they can out of your loudest and proudest customers.

By not striving to disrupt bot traffic activity on your site, you’re letting your customers down. They have an expectation their experience will be fair and if it’s not, they’ll leave your site empty-handed, disappointed and angry – and that will damage your brand reputation.

Search YouTube and you'll find no shortage of videos titled “How to cop sneakers with bots” or “How to start sneaker botting”. You can put these videos alongside any other get-rich-quick scheme and your customers know it. If most of your product ends up being resold on eBay, Vinted, Depop and similar sites, they won’t end up getting posted on Instagram, they won’t get talked about on TikTok – the only thing your biggest advocates will post about is how annoying it is that they’ve got to shell out way more money just to get the product they were desperate for.

You know that your best brand advocates are your most loyal customers and disappointing them, or, worse, having them turn on your brand, means so much more than one sale.

How to mitigate bot traffic during a flash sale

Bot traffic isn’t just used to get your product in the hands of scalpers as quickly as possible – one of the most common bot tactics is to just lock as much inventory in carts as possible and take time checking out, leaving customers seeing 'sold out’ before the product really has.

Even the simplest virtual queue can reduce the chances of this happening.

Virtual waiting rooms, like CrowdHandler, work by taking the traffic meant for one page on your site and offloading that traffic elsewhere, hosted off-site. They can then allow that traffic back onto the site at a rate that you set.

This measure alone prevents bots from snapping up all of your inventory immediately. And our pre-drop randomisation feature means that the bots won’t all be at the front of the line, as they would be in any first-in-first-out queue. This method alone provides some benefit to stopping bots.

At the very least your customers can see your stock selling out more slowly, and fairly. So a Virtual Waiting Room alone is an important first step, but it’s not enough, because scalpers will then seek to improve their chances by creating as many positions as possible in the queue. It’s then, when the bots are swarming the waiting room, waiting to be allowed onto your site where they’re most vulnerable to being discovered and blocked.

On the surface, identifying bot traffic vs. human traffic is actually quite easy and you could eliminate just about all bots visiting your site based on a few reputational factors. The challenge is that indiscriminately targeting proxy networks means that some human customers are going to get swept up alongside the bots.

So eliminating as many bots as possible, whilst still leaving as many of your loyal customers in the queue as you can requires a series of progressive measures:

Let’s start with CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart). There’s a reason why anyone who’s been on the internet for any length of time has likely selected three pictures of traffic lights out of a grid of nine. Whilst AI can solve CAPTCHAs as can mechanical Turks, they are still a very effective way of eliminating the basic scraper bot traffic on your site and they significantly increase the costs of running more sophisticated bots. So we highly recommend enabling our CAPTCHA feature for any significant drop. This way you can’t get access to the queue without first completing a CAPTCHA.

You can also configure CrowdHandler to block IP addresses with too many sessions. A legitimate customer might have your site open on their phone, their laptop and for good measure maybe a tablet, but over 50 sessions? Likely a bot.

Picking the right threshold for you is a matter of judgement, but we think it’s best to be upfront with your customers and tell them that too many tabs or devices may result in them being blocked. CrowdHandler also has access to databases of data centres and proxy networks and can easily filter this traffic out, delivering a serious reduction in bot traffic. But again you should be upfront with your customers, telling them to switch off VPNs when purchasing your product.

Our anomaly detection feature also allows us to identify and remove sessions that show unusual activity such as Session Fixation – where a URL is accessed with a predefined session identifier (effectively taking over another legitimate session) – or unusual geolocation – where sessions appear from regions that likely wouldn’t be relevant for your product. No single violation would lead to a blocked human customer, but a combination of anomalous factors may be enough to tip their score into the block threshold.

With CrowdHandler’s Virtual Waiting Room, your brand comes first. Product launches should be an opportunity to build hype and anticipation but, most importantly, create a great user experience.

If your goal is to just sell your product – you might be happy to see bots flooding your checkout. But if you want to make a product drop an event – one that your customers shout about and come back to every time you do one – you need to implement processes to remove scalpers using unfair tactics to get to your product before your customers can.

Stopping bots isn’t just about protecting your site – it’s about protecting your brand by improving the customer experience.

Are you curious about how we can help your customers get the very best experience during your next product drop? Visit our plans page or schedule a demo with us to learn more.