Filter countries + Mailerlite integeration

Dear @rohtopia, thanks for your question, it’s always sweet to get questions, feedback and suggestions from our users.

Please allow me to answer all of your questions in the order you have asked them.

1) About the weird traffic you have recently started seeing with ghost abandoned carts. I’m afraid your store is being heavily visited by bots. We could divide them into two groups – good bots and bad ones. The good ones might be trying to scrape your website for search engine results like Google etc. Now the bad ones are constantly trying to poke your website to find weak spots and take advantage of them.
With our recent release of CartBounty ghost carts – we have started getting from a couple of store owners that they are seeing the same behavior as you are describing and we are preparing to place your questions in our FAQ list since this seems to be frequent issue.
Now let’s get to the point on how to solve this issue. At this point we have two options:

• Disable ghost cart capture under CartBounty settings tab. This way you will no longer be seeing carts left by bots. However this does not mean that the bad bots constantly hitting your store will go away. They still will be visiting your store and besides the harmful poking around they also make your server work more thus slowing down your overall store while trying to serve them.
• The second solution is to block bad bots and keep them off your store. This is dealing with the issue at the core, but might need to involve your developer to help you identify the bots and blocking them via .htaccess file, here is a good article on how to do that: https://www.seoblog.com/block-bots-spiders-htaccess/. If developer is not an option, you could also try using a WP plugin for blocking bots like this one here: https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/blackhole-bad-bots/

This should take care of your issue with ghost carts from bots.

2) About showing Exit Intent just to visitors from a specific country. It is not possible at this point, but I would like to know why would you need this feature so we could include this as a feature request in our wish-list features?

3) Great suggestion on new integrations, MailerLite has been under our radar and we already did our research with them. Unfortunately at this moment they do not provide access to their E-commerce features to third party applications meaning we are not able to sync abandoned carts over to them due to missing functionality.

Hope this answers all of your questions.
Looking forward to hearing back from you.

Best,
Nauris

Hi Nauris,

thanks for your super fast, extensive and well explained reply.

1. I’ll have a go at the .htaccess file to start with. I am still confused, why all these bots do not show in our google analytics though, would you know why this might be? We also use Wordfence, and there, a lot login attempts are shown with other countries than the US as the location.

2. As I understood, the exit popup will invite users to enter their email address to keep the cart content saved, and this email will then automatically be added to the newsletter list if it’s connected. We can only ship within Australia so it would be mostly a waste to have subscribers from overseas in our mailing list.

3. I’ll keep my fingers crossed then ??

Thank you and have a great day,

Lisa

… I followed the instructions on https://www.seoblog.com/block-bots-spiders-htaccess/ and added the pastebin list https://pastebin.com/5Hw9KZnW as described but we still get US entries, maybe a few less but still a whole lot.

Also, after activating the exit intent pop up, I looked at the website in Chrome – this worked perfectly, Safari and Firefox: those two didn’t show the exit intent.

Do you have any idea why this might be?

Thank you,

Lisa

• This reply was modified 4 years, 5 months ago by rohtopia.

Hi @rohtopia glad to hear back from you ??

It sounds like your store might be under some heavy bot traffic which not only adds security risks, but also slows down your server.
The story with Google Analytics and why they do not show bots is because it is Google ?? they have workforce, knowledge, AI and resources to analyze traffic, data, visitor’s patterns etc. to determine if the visitor is a human being or not.
I would suggest you reaching out to your developer or hosting provider (sometimes they also tend to help). And let them take a look at your server log files to see who is accessing your store, determine which of those are harmful bots and block them using the .htaccess file. Also did you try installing that harmful bot blocking plugin that I previously sent you? It might also be quite useful in your case.

About the Exit Intent part. You are correct, the abandoned carts get synced over to the 3rd party email provider you have selected, however you should be able to create a filter over at MailChimp, ActiveCampaign or GetResponse that uses the Country and decides if the customer is eligible to get a newsletter or not.
The Exit Intent has been tested on all of those browsers you mentioned.
Please make sure you have not checked the “Enable test mode” under Exit Intent and that you have added at least one product to your shopping cart and have not already entered your email or phone in the Checkout form before trying to leave.

Warm regards,
Nauris