Bots add one-off items to carts

  • Resolved sometimeska

    (@sometimeska)


    10 months, 3 weeks ago

    Hi, I have a large woocommerce store (with WCFM) . We only have one of each item. When we post a new sale we frequently have a bot come and add almost all of the items on sale to carts (I discovered this by using the Abandoned Carts plugin – where I see 30 carts being created within seconds of each other when a new sale is posted) . Because there is only one of each item it then seems as though everything is sold out. I have created a robots.txt to prevent this but it obviously doesn’t work as bots which do this ignore that file. How can I prevent this? My customers do not all create accounts and can purchase as guests if they want to, but this event happens before checkout, it’s a simple add to cart event that i need to prevent bots from accessing. Hope you can help.

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

  • Hey there, @sometimeska! Thanks for contacting us. I’m happy to help you.

    I understand this is a frustrating situation.

    I recommend reading these two articles to help you prevent this issue:

    https://thriveagency.com/news/the-ultimate-guide-to-htaccess-for-webmasters-blocking-bad-bots-and-spiders/

    https://puri.io/blog/prevent-bots-from-adding-products-to-the-woocommerce-cart/

    There are also some plugins that might help you with this. You can search for “stop bots“, or something similar, on the Plugins > Add New section of your dashboard or on a search engine like Google, for example.

    Please note that we do not provide support for third-party plugins, so it is good to check the plugin thoroughly to see if it is reliable. You can find more about this in this guide.

    I hope this was clarifying. Please let us know if there’s anything else we can do to help or if you have any questions.

    Have a wonderful day!

    Thread Starter sometimeska

    (@sometimeska)

    Thank you for your reply. I will check these out. I know that adding code to robots.txt requesting that bots don’t index those links doesn’t work, and that plugins like black hole for bad bots don’t work with WP rocket or other caching plugins, but eventually I’ll find a way to do it. Just not quite sure how to identify the bots…

    Hey, @sometimeska!

    If none of the suggestions in the articles don’t help, please let us know so we can assist you further. ??

    Please let us know if there’s anything else we can do to help or if you have any questions.

    Have a wonderful day!

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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