Today I wanted to raise awareness about an issue I’ve recently observed in one of my client’s stores. My apologies beforehand if this is not the best place to post this.
Since November, my client has been utilizing Shop Campaigns as a strategy for customer acquisition. However, I’ve noticed a significant increase in bot traffic coming from Bellevue Washington since the Campaign started.
As a result, we’re experiencing a rise in abandoned checkouts, a decline in conversion rates, and lower email open rates—essentially skewing our analytics.
Currently, this bot traffic accounts for approximately 10% of the monthly traffic for this client and the only way to stop this was halting Shop campaigns which decreased the bot traffic significantly and to completely stop it enforce sign-ups for checkout.
Has anyone else encountered this issue, and is the Shopify team aware of it?
I’m not 100% if this problem is indeed stemming from Shop Campaigns, but it could be related and that means it can significantly undermine their effectiveness, leading to wasted marketing budgets for Shopify due to fake leads.
Same for us, except we never used Shop Campaigns. But we too have had a massive influx of new customers all using the same address (House Number 43) in Bellevue WA. It’s way over 10% of our monthly traffic, and has caused our site’s conversion rate to drop by over 80%. It’s also adding these spammy bots to our email lists.
Shopify support has suggested we set up a Flow to auto-delete these customers (which is far from 100% effective at catching them), and that we filter our reports to exclude the bots (PITA). It’s insane to me that the platform can’t catch and block this traffic, or at least prevent the bots from being added to our customer lists.
Another point of note: the link you shared discussed the issue as pertaining to Bellevue. My experience has been that the addresses of the bot customers are located in Bellevue, however the traffic appears to be coming from Ashburn VA in theory.
I’ve been up and back with Shopify support for a couple months. There’s been no slowing of the bot traffic, no ability to prevent them from being added to our customer list, and no really helpful solution to mitigate the impact on our workflows. It’s costing us money and time and making us dislike Shopify.
This could be a new trend due to AI scraping, web spiders or other apps that are scraping product details or other information.
Have you identified the User-Agent in these requests from this specific IP? It might give you a clue to who is scraping and they might respect your robots.txt policy or have some kind of opt out signal.
If it truly is a bad actor that will ignore your requests to scrape, then your next best course of action is to enable Bot Protection. Unfortunately at this time it’s only available for Shopify Plus accounts.
Otherwise, you can transfer your store’s DNS registrar to CloudFlare and enable bot protection through their service.
Background: I build a web scraping blocking app and supported it from 2020-2023.
Mitigation Strategy Till resolved we suggest GEO fencing and block all traffic from Bellevue. This is what we did as step one when we had this issue with one of our clients.
Our observation was that Shopify analytics was showing these hits( server side analytics ) while analytics based on JS like GA4 were not recording these visits.Which means the bots were being used and as they didnt had the JS so analytics data was not pushed to GA4.
Till resolved we suggest GEO fencing and block all traffic from Bellevue.
Bellevue is one of the wealthiest cities in the United States. It’s a tech hub that hosts multiple data centers, which is most likely where this traffic is originating from.
Blindly blocking all traffic by geolocation means you’re also blocking actual customers too.
I wouldn’t recommend blocking by location alone, you’ll end up causing more harm than good.
Till resolved we suggest GEO fencing and block all traffic from Bellevue. This is what we did as step one when we had this issue with one of our clients.