By samAxolotl
Hi all,
I’m writing in hopes that someone could help me out.
I have a Shopify e-com store that I’ve operated for the past 3 years. A little under a month ago, my marketing (Facebook Ads) and store analytics became skewed. There were numbers of checkouts and add-to-carts that didn’t add up.
I found out that the majority of these “add to carts” and “checkouts” were coming from an IP address belonging to a DigitalOcean server in Clifton, NJ.
My guess is that someone/bot is using a VPN hosted by DigitalOcean and targeting my store to mess up my marketing analytics and store traffic - or worse.
I really have no idea what to do. I reported the IP addresses to DigitalOcean (sent them a sample log) but never heard back. Shopify can’t really do anything on their end. I installed an app on my store to block IP’s or locations so I blocked out Clifton but I’m still seeing traffic (via Google Analytics) coming from Clifton…
If anyone has any clue what is going on and what I can do please let me know. These store sessions on my site are really damaging my store and I know they are not from marketing campaigns as they are visiting directly to a product page.
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Hi there,
In my personal opinion, I believe that the best way to protect your store from bots would be to enable Google ReCaptcha, as even if you block all the IP addresses associated with a specific provider, the owners of the bot could move it to a different provider, so it would not be a long term solution.
You can enable ReCaptcha for your Shopify Store by following the steps from the official documentation here under the Enable or disable reCAPTCHA on online store section:
If the ReCaptcha is already enabled, what you could do is try using an anti-spam/bot plugin from the Shopify store like this one here for an example:
https://apps.shopify.com/ellipsis-human-presence-technology
Regards, Bobby
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