Is your ecommerce site getting a lot of traffic? Well, that might not be a good thing, as a new report found that 40% of visitors on ecommerce websites were bots in the last 12 months.
The online world has gotten pretty chaotic over the last year. From Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter to increased security threats around every corner, it can feel like you can’t trust anything you see online.
Unfortunately, this trend appears to be bleeding into the ecommerce world, as it turns out a large percentage of traffic to these sites is fake at best, and actively malicious at worst.
A Lot of Ecommerce Traffic Is Bots
According to the State of Security within eCommerce 2022 report from Imperva, bot activity accounted for 40% of all ecommerce traffic in the last year.
Fortunately, not all of the traffic is from “bad bots,” which the report describes as “automated threats that contribute online fraud. Some of it comes from good bots, which aren’t active threats, but merely non-human entities that can throw off your traffic numbers a bit.
Still, even with 16.6% of traffic coming from good bots and 23.7% coming from bad bots, it’s still significant that this much is collective bot traffic, particularly because there is a negative impact associated with both.
“Despite their name, even good bots can be bad news for businesses. Good bots can skew web analytics reports, making some pages appear more popular than they actually are. In addition to that, they can also hamper conversion rates.”
Either way, this report should make you reconsider your ecommerce website traffic and perhaps take some steps to ensure you are protected as much as possible.
How to Protect Your Business
We understand that, as a business owner, you probably don’t want your ecommerce website to be inundated with bots, good or bad, as they likely won’t help you improve your ecommerce conversion rates. After all, they could be substantially throwing off your analytics, or worse, infiltrating your customer data and selling it to third parties.
Fortunately, Imperva included some tips in the report for businesses that want to shore up their ecommerce security before the business holiday season. Here they are:
- Have a plan for the high-volume traffic that comes with Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
- Take extra steps to protect marketing and ecommerce campaigns, as they are likely targets for cyberattacks.
- Encourage good account credential hygiene and safety with strict password rules and multifactor authentication.
- Secure all existing website functionalities to ensure there aren’t any gaps
- Take inventory of all your client and server-side JavaScript-based services so you know when something is out of sorts before it’s too late.
There are also tools like antivirus software, password managers, and VPNs that can help you keep your business as safe as possible from bots, cyberattacks, and security breaches.
