Checkout Fraud

From tickets and events to shoe retailers and businesses in between, the e-commerce boom has coincided with a rash of checkout fraud. Consoles, sneakers, even hand sanitizer — fraudsters nab things fast, get in line first, and check out quickly.

Adversaries abuse the checkout process in multiple ways:

• Hoarding inventory
• Testing stolen credit cards
• Abusing coupons and promotions

The bots behind it go by many names — shopping bots, scalper or "Grinch" bots, sneaker bots — and they do the most damage against in-demand, limited-availability items. Sometimes they buy out inventory to resell at steep profit. Other times they hold it all in checkout carts without ever purchasing: a denial-of-inventory attack that makes the retailer look sold out and pushes real buyers to resellers.

Whatever the end result, checkout fraud is a violation of fairness, convenience, and trust that frustrates customers and erodes brand equity.

From your revenue to your customer experience to your very brand itself, checkout fraud has a range of harmful effects:

• Poor UX, CX, and site performance
• Unfair shopping experiences
• Compromised high-traffic events (hype, flash, or ticket sales)
• Excessive and unpredictable infrastructure costs
• Loss of customers
• Damage to your reputation and brand equity

A key piece of e-commerce success is more traffic — but the right kind of traffic. On an average day, bots make up roughly half of web traffic; during a big product reveal or hype sale, that share can spike to nearly all of it.

Sneaker bots are some of the most sophisticated in the industry. Blockdash's layered defenses make it difficult and time-consuming for adversaries to impersonate human users and retool, and the architecture scales up instantly to meet flash-traffic demand. Combine that with analytics showing exactly what's automated and what's real, and you've got a powerful one-two punch: better-quality traffic, more conversions, and infrastructure savings.

One global footwear manufacturer's flash sales were continuously compromised by denial-of-inventory attacks. Blockdash stepped in, stopped the attacks, and increased the brand's legitimate web traffic 100-fold.