What are Scalper Bots?
Scalper bots are automated programs designed to purchase popular items online quickly. These bots track when high-demand products, like limited-edition sneakers, gaming consoles, or concert tickets, become available. They can add items to the cart and complete the purchase faster than human shoppers.
Attackers use scalper bots to purchase large quantities of goods or tickets and resell them at a marked-up price. This often causes frustration among genuine buyers and creates an unfair market.
For instance, these bots have been grabbing limited stock of PS5 and Xbox consoles from sites like eBay and Amazon, only to resell them at significantly higher prices. This practice not only disrupts the availability of popular items but also drives up costs for consumers and damages trust in the online shopping experience.
How Scalper Bots Work?
Scalper bots operate by constantly monitoring retailer websites for the release of high-demand items. As soon as a sale begins, these bots spring into action, quickly gathering all relevant information such as the retailer’s website, item price, available stock, and SKU number.
Once the bot detects the item is available, it automatically adds it to the cart and bypasses the usual shopping process by heading straight to the checkout page. This rapid and automated approach allows scalper bots to complete purchases far faster than human shoppers, securing limited stock before individual buyers even have a chance to act.
These bots can also use many different web browsers which makes it harder for stores to stop them. To avoid detection and remain effective, scalper bots use several advanced techniques:
Fake Account Creation: Bots generate numerous fake accounts to get around purchase limits and increase their chances of obtaining more items.
Captcha Solvers: Automated captcha solvers help bots bypass security measures intended to block non-human traffic.
Proxy Usage: Bots route their activity through various proxy servers, masking their true IP addresses and making it difficult for retailers to trace and block them.
How Scalper Bots Impact Your Go-to-Market Strategy
Scalper bots pose significant threats to go-to-market (GTM) strategies across various industries, particularly in e-commerce and e-ticketing by disrupting the availability and accessibility of high-demand products. These automated programs quickly purchase limited stock, preventing genuine customers from accessing items at launch.
A notable example is the sale of Taylor Swift’s concert tickets, which were snatched up by bots within minutes of going live, leaving many fans empty-handed and frustrated. As a result, many tickets immediately appeared on secondary markets, with some fans paying up to 70 times the original price, while others could not get tickets at all. This not only reduces customer access but also leads to widespread dissatisfaction, potentially damaging your brand’s reputation and image.
Scalper bots can distort sales data, which in turn impacts inventory management and future go-to-market strategies. Additionally, scalper bots often resell items at inflated prices on secondary markets. This not only increases costs for consumers but also feels like unfairly raising prices. Overall, these issues can compromise the success of your product launch, making it crucial to implement robust anti-bot solutions and improve inventory and customer communication strategies to mitigate these risks.
Check out the Top 13 Bot Management Software in the Market.
Why Traditional Methods Fail to Detect Scalper Bots
Basic security measures like CAPTCHAs and IP blocking are easily bypassed by advanced bots using techniques such as rotating IPs, headless browsers, and proxies. Scalper bots operate at speeds and volumes that outpace these methods, making detection challenging.
Moreover, these security measures are usually static to deal with the evolving nature of advanced bot techniques. To effectively combat scalper bots, more advanced bot protection solutions like behavioural analysis and machine learning-based detection are needed.
How Does AppTrana WAAP Stop Scalper Bots?
AppTrana WAAP bot management solution uses multi-layered techniques to block advanced bots like scalper bots. Its AI-driven behavioural analysis monitors a range of factors like IP addresses, user agents, URIs, and bounce rates to detect anomalies in user behaviour. Further, it analyses real-time interactions to identify unusual patterns, such as excessive and rapid requests or irregular navigation, which are indicative of scalper bot activity.
The module incorporates an anomaly-based risk-scoring system to detect and block these bots. It begins by establishing a normal user behaviour baseline. When it detects abnormal actions—such as a user rapidly searching for and trying to purchase a large number of tickets—the system assigns a high anomaly score to this behaviour. If the score exceeds a predefined threshold, the system automatically prevents the bot from making further transactions, ensuring that genuine users are not disturbed.
Moreover, its managed service team provides continuous monitoring and adaptation to advanced bot strategies, ensuring the solution remains effective and accurate against evolving threats.
