Whitepaper
April 2022

Fraud in E-Commerce

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Every e-commerce website on the internet has a bot problem – yours included!

According to our data, 57% of global Internet traffic is generated by bots and 16% of all ad clicks are fake or low-quality.

In this white paper, we give you insights into the rising bot problem for your e-commerce website. Who are the bot operators, what are the threats of automated bot attacks and what is the impact on your e-commerce business.

1 %

of all ad clicks are fake or low-quality

$ 1

billion in losses expected in 2022 from digital advertising fraud

> 1 %

of businesses lose 3% to 10% of their revenue to bot attacks

Summary

Bots visit your website regularly for various reasons: Some simply want to ping your server to check its uptime, but some bots are more malicious in nature. These bots want to harm your website, your advertising budget or even your whole business in various ways:

Crash your server via DDoS attacks
Steal credit card details of your customers
Scrape your prices to benefit your competition

The biggest impact of criminal bot attacks on e-commerce is ad fraud:

Automated bots are programmed to click on your ads and continuously drain your marketing budget just to fill the pockets of fraudsters. According to our own data, 16% of all ad clicks are invalid or low-quality.
Over 40% of businesses lose between 3% and 10% of their revenue to automated bot attacks.
Malicious bots are largely responsible for the majority of the $81 billion in losses expected in 2022 from digital advertising fraud.

The following white paper highlights the significance of bot traffic and shows you exactly who is attacking you, how they do it, and what the impact of the attacks is on your business.

We will also show you why you should protect yourself from bot traffic and how you can do it.

Bot Operators

Bots are usually operated by one of the following three groups:

Competitors
Resellers
Criminals

Bot Activity

We dive into the anatomy of bots, how they behave, where they come from and what their ultimate goal is.

We also give you insights into how you can spot bots in your analytics.

Impact on E-Commerce

We give you the numbers! Learn what the impact of bot traffic and fake ad clicks is on your e-commerce business and how you can protect your ad spent.