3 ms·

Can’t you useragent sniff the bot and cut it off? If u want help coding this or advice happy to help (for free)

Alupis 6y ago
If you cut it off, you get penalized in Google Merchant Tools, and possibly have your product feed suppressed, which will dramatically impact your search visibility for both text and product searches. It can also impact your Google Ads if you link that with your product feed, and more. So, effectively, no you cannot cut this bot off. To make it worse, the bot doesn't always follow the same pattern. Sometimes slightly different names, addresses, etc. We initially thought it was fraud attempts, but none of them actually attempt a checkout. They just enter all their info on the checkout page, get the final quote, and bail. It would have been nice if Google told people about this instead of it just happening. Or allowed you to schedule a time slot for it to do what it's going to do.
- dzmien 6y ago
  I wonder why Google didn't include a "cleanup" routine that empties the shopping cart after the data is collected. It seems like it would be a trivial thing to do, unless I am missing something. I guess the answer is because it would not benefit them in any way.
  - Alupis 6y ago
    We'd still have an abandoned cart, since the session was created and held some sort of data - but it would be far less disruptive for sure. Empty Abandoned Carts are useless anyway (for stats and other things - we track bounce rates in other ways), so that would be a large improvement from what is going on right now.
- Felk 6y ago
  It sounds like you interpreted malux85 suggestion as cutting the bot off from putting things in the cart altogether. What I understood is that, given it's recognizable by user agent, those carts can be marked as created by a bot to exclude it from statistics and reminder mails only.
  - Alupis 6y ago
    Perhaps. Not everyone is lucky enough to have built their own ecommerce platform, so many people are at the whims of whatever tools Shopify, BigCommerce, 3dCart or others provide. For this particular problem, none of those platforms can provide any assistance.
- malux85 6y ago
  Good lord, that sucks, hopefully a google engineer is in this thread...

If you cut it off, you get penalized in Google Merchant Tools, and possibly have your product feed suppressed, which will dramatically impact your search visibility for both text and product searches. It can also impact your Google Ads if you link that with your product feed, and more. So, effectively, no you cannot cut this bot off. To make it worse, the bot doesn't always follow the same pattern. Sometimes slightly different names, addresses, etc. We initially thought it was fraud attempts, but none of them actually attempt a checkout. They just enter all their info on the checkout page, get the final quote, and bail. It would have been nice if Google told people about this instead of it just happening. Or allowed you to schedule a time slot for it to do what it's going to do.

dzmien 6y ago
I wonder why Google didn't include a "cleanup" routine that empties the shopping cart after the data is collected. It seems like it would be a trivial thing to do, unless I am missing something. I guess the answer is because it would not benefit them in any way.
- Alupis 6y ago
  We'd still have an abandoned cart, since the session was created and held some sort of data - but it would be far less disruptive for sure. Empty Abandoned Carts are useless anyway (for stats and other things - we track bounce rates in other ways), so that would be a large improvement from what is going on right now.
Felk 6y ago
It sounds like you interpreted malux85 suggestion as cutting the bot off from putting things in the cart altogether. What I understood is that, given it's recognizable by user agent, those carts can be marked as created by a bot to exclude it from statistics and reminder mails only.
- Alupis 6y ago
  Perhaps. Not everyone is lucky enough to have built their own ecommerce platform, so many people are at the whims of whatever tools Shopify, BigCommerce, 3dCart or others provide. For this particular problem, none of those platforms can provide any assistance.
malux85 6y ago
Good lord, that sucks, hopefully a google engineer is in this thread...