With the first major eCommerce holiday of the year rapidly approaching, Valentine’s Day is projected to surpass last year’s sales of $21 billion USD, nearly a third of which was generated through eCommerce. Online retailers like 1-800-Flowers and Edible Arrangements are preparing for the influx of customers looking to secure their gifts for the upcoming holiday.
While online retailers are looking to maximize their sales, cybercriminals are on the lookout for ways to exploit the holiday and turn a profit, using bots as their weapon of choice. Bot attacks not only threaten a company’s sales but their customer’s experience and brand reputation as well. Malicious bot attacks can result in degraded website performance, competitive information being scraped, compromised accounts, payment fraud, and exposure to sensitive customer data.
Web and Price Scraping Threaten Online Sales
Web scraping affects many eCommerce websites year-round, but following the 2021 holiday season retailers should be extra wary of fake websites used to sell counterfeit goods or by competitors to gain an upper hand.
As consumers look to purchase the perfect gift for their loved ones, they may not realize they’re browsing fake websites designed to look like the real-deal. Most common in the luxury space, bad actors scrape retailers’ websites, set up identical online shops on spoofed domains, and use paid search ads to be easily found, all to sell discounted counterfeit goods which results in lost revenue for the retailer. To make matters worse, these sites often contain spear phishing attacks that attempt to skim credentials or download malware to a consumer’s device, causing even more damage. These attacks harm the victim company’s brand and reputation as consumers think they are interacting with the real company, not a counterfeit.
