Running an e-commerce business is hard enough as it is. In 2026, there are nearly 31 million e-commerce websites globally, with global sales projected to reach over $6.88 trillion by 2028.
That’s a whole lot of competition to contend with, and if you’re running a small business, actually standing out and capturing your share of that market can feel like an uphill battle.
It doesn’t help, then, that it isn’t just competition from other businesses that you have to deal with – it’s the nature of the internet too.
By that, we mean the threat of e-commerce scalpers and their ability to buy up inventory and disrupt your genuine customer experiences.
What are E-Commerce Scalpers?
Before we get into dealing with this threat, let’s take a look at what e-commerce scalpers actually are. Not long ago, most e-commerce scalpers were simply individual resellers – people who manually monitored websites and tried to purchase high-demand items before others could.
Over time, however, scalpers have grown more sophisticated, becoming automated bots that can simultaneously target multiple sites to buy products in bulk as soon as they become available – often with the intention of selling those products at higher prices.
What is the Solution?
The solution to stop bot attacks like this comes in the form of advanced bot protection platforms. One of the most trusted and widely used platforms right now, for instance, is DataDome, which is designed to detect, analyze, and block malicious bots quickly and efficiently.
Whether it’s through device fingerprinting – collecting dozens of attributes to build a unique identity for each visitor – behavioral analysis – using biometrics to measure how a user interacts with a page – or honeypots – an invisible form field present in the HTML that isn’t visible to human users – DataDome has a range of detection mechanisms that can identify and block various cyberattack techniques, protecting e-commerce websites and apps in a way that doesn’t interfere with their legitimate users.
Not only this, but the tools available can work to mitigate bot traffic after it’s been detected. Detecting a bot is only half the job, of course. You also need a response strategy that is accurately matched to the confidence level of each detection.
Let’s say the detection isn’t fully certain and needs a bit of additional verification to confirm malicious behavior. DataDome issues cryptographic challenges that force the requesting client to perform CPU-intensive computation. A legitimate browser would solve these in milliseconds, but a bot farm running thousands of concurrent sessions would incur significant cost increases, making this type of automated attack far more expensive and much less viable.
Meanwhile, other high-confidence detections are blocked immediately, either with a hard 403 or by serving alternative content – some businesses, for instance, serve slightly altered data to confirmed scalpers, thwarting competitors’ intelligence while keeping the bot occupied and ineffective.
Why Does Traditional Security Fail?
Advanced security like this is needed, because as we mentioned previously, the landscape of e-commerce bots has grown more sophisticated. Some of the most traditional security measures include CAPTCHA challenges, IP blocking, or rate limiting, but all of these are growing increasingly ineffective against modern bot networks that can mimic human behavior at scale.
Looking at CAPTCHA as a prime example, this is designed to differentiate humans from bots by presenting tasks that are assumed to be easy for people but difficult for automated scripts.
Whether it’s through AI or machine learning, however, modern bots have become far more capable, using tools like OCR – optical character recognition – and automated solving services to solve CAPTCHAs quickly and render them largely ineffective.
Not to mention, one of the main reasons why so many companies avoid CAPTCHA is because it’s frustrating to legitimate users. How many times have you clicked on a website, only to be met with one of those image-based challenges telling you to click all the squares with a motorbike in them? Adding on to this, how many times has it assumed you got it wrong, and made you redo the process?
According to another study, around 15% to 30% of users abandon a website when confronted with a traditional CAPTCHA, and this is a conversion loss that you can ill afford to use if you’re a small business and every customer really counts.
The thing about DataDome is that it all happens behind the scenes – no interruptions, no extra clicks. This not only makes it a seamless protection system for you, but effectively removes friction for customers, ensuring that no human traffic is blocked and no cart is abandoned in your fight against scrapers.
This, of course, is the most important thing. Beyond protecting your analytics and revenue, safeguarding your inventory and marketing campaigns, you’re stopping e-commerce scrapers because you’re trying to make an impact: to get the right shoppers to your products and make your company as successful as possible.
