Bots now account for a significant share of all internet traffic, and e-commerce stores are among the most heavily targeted. In 2026, automated attacks against online stores have become more sophisticated, harder to detect, and more damaging than ever. Whether you’re running a small Shopify store or a high-volume brand, understanding the bot landscape is no longer optional - it’s essential for protecting your revenue, inventory, and customer trust.
This guide covers the types of bots targeting e-commerce, the industries hit hardest, and practical strategies for defending your store.
The State of Bot Attacks in 2026
Bot traffic has grown steadily year over year, and the trend shows no sign of slowing. Industry reports estimate that over 40% of all e-commerce website traffic now comes from automated sources, with a growing portion classified as malicious.
Several factors are driving the increase:
- AI-generated bots are now capable of mimicking human behavior more convincingly, bypassing traditional detection methods like CAPTCHAs and rate limiting
- Bot-as-a-service platforms have lowered the barrier to entry, allowing anyone to launch an attack without technical expertise
- Residential proxy networks make it nearly impossible to distinguish bot traffic from legitimate customers based on IP address alone
- Headless browsers and browser automation frameworks have matured to the point where they execute JavaScript, handle cookies, and render pages just like a real user
The result is an arms race between merchants and attackers, where the cost of doing nothing keeps rising.
Types of Bots Targeting E-commerce Stores
Sneaker Bots (Checkout Bots)
Originally built to buy limited-edition sneakers, checkout bots have expanded into electronics, concert tickets, collectibles, and any product with limited supply. These bots complete the checkout process in milliseconds, buying out inventory before human customers can even load the product page.
Impact: Legitimate customers are locked out. Products sell out instantly and reappear on resale markets at inflated prices. Customer frustration drives them away from your brand.
Scraper Bots
Scraper bots crawl your product pages to extract pricing, descriptions, images, and inventory levels. Competitors use this data to undercut your pricing in real time. Clone sites use it to build convincing replicas of your store.
Impact: Loss of competitive advantage, increased clone site risk, and higher server costs from the additional load.
Credential Stuffing Bots
These bots use lists of stolen username/password combinations (from data breaches) to attempt logins on your store. When they find a match, they take over customer accounts, access saved payment methods, or make fraudulent purchases.
Impact: Account takeovers, chargebacks, customer data theft, and erosion of trust.
Inventory Hoarding Bots
Also known as “denial of inventory” bots, these add products to carts without completing the purchase. This locks up inventory, making items appear out of stock to real customers. Attackers may use this to manipulate your sales or benefit a competitor.
Impact: Lost sales during peak periods, distorted inventory data, and frustrated customers who see “sold out” on items that aren’t actually purchased.
Price Scraping Bots
A subset of scraper bots focused specifically on pricing. These run continuously, monitoring your prices and feeding the data to competitors or price comparison engines. Some even trigger dynamic pricing changes on competitor sites within minutes of you updating your prices.
Impact: Undermined pricing strategy and reduced margins as competitors respond instantly to your changes.
Gift Card and Coupon Bots
These bots systematically test gift card numbers or promotional codes to find valid balances or active discounts. Once a valid code is found, it’s used for unauthorized purchases or sold on secondary markets.
Impact: Direct financial loss from redeemed gift cards and promotional abuse that cuts into margins.
Industries Hit Hardest
While no e-commerce store is immune, certain industries face disproportionate bot activity.
Sneakers and streetwear remain the most targeted category for checkout bots. Limited drops are routinely bought out by automated buyers within seconds.
Consumer electronics see heavy bot activity during product launches and holiday sales. GPUs, gaming consoles, and smartphones are frequent targets for both checkout bots and inventory hoarders.
Beauty and cosmetics have become an increasingly targeted sector as limited-edition collaborations and influencer-driven launches create the same scarcity dynamics that attract sneaker bots.
Ticketing and events continue to battle bots that purchase tickets in bulk for resale, despite legislative efforts in multiple countries.
Luxury goods and collectibles attract bots targeting anything with resale value, from designer handbags to trading cards.
How Bots Evade Traditional Defenses
Modern bots are built to bypass the most common detection methods.
- CAPTCHA solving - Services and AI models can now solve CAPTCHAs faster than humans, making traditional challenge-response systems unreliable as a sole defense
- Residential proxies - Bots route traffic through real residential IP addresses, making IP-based blocking ineffective
- Browser fingerprint spoofing - Advanced bots randomize browser fingerprints (user agent, screen resolution, installed fonts) to avoid fingerprint-based detection
- Human-like behavior patterns - Bots simulate mouse movements, scroll behavior, and typing speed to pass behavioral analysis checks
- Distributed attacks - Rather than hitting your store from a single source, bots distribute requests across thousands of IPs, staying below rate limits
Protection Strategies That Work
Defending against modern bots requires a layered approach. No single technique is sufficient on its own.
Rate Limiting and Throttling
Set limits on how many requests a single IP or session can make within a given timeframe. This won’t stop sophisticated bots but raises the cost of attacks and catches less advanced automation.
Device and Browser Fingerprinting
Analyze the technical characteristics of each visitor’s browser and device. While advanced bots can spoof individual signals, analyzing dozens of signals together makes detection more reliable.
Behavioral Analysis
Monitor how visitors interact with your site. Bots, even sophisticated ones, tend to exhibit patterns that differ from real shoppers - such as navigating directly to checkout, skipping product browsing, or completing forms at inhuman speed.
Bot-Specific CAPTCHAs
Modern CAPTCHA solutions use risk-based challenges that only present visual puzzles to suspicious sessions. This minimizes friction for real customers while adding barriers for automated traffic.
Checkout Protection
Implement measures specifically at checkout: purchase limits per customer, address verification, payment velocity checks, and session validation. This is the last line of defense before a bot completes a fraudulent purchase.
Continuous Monitoring
Bot tactics evolve constantly. What works today may not work next month. Ongoing monitoring of traffic patterns, failed login attempts, cart abandonment rates, and checkout velocity helps you detect new attack patterns as they emerge.
How SecurEcommerce Helps
SecurEcommerce provides several layers of protection relevant to bot defense for Shopify stores:
- Active blocking allows you to block traffic from known bot networks, suspicious IP ranges, and high-risk regions
- VPN and proxy detection identifies visitors using VPNs, data center IPs, and known proxy networks commonly associated with bot traffic
- CAPTCHA integration adds challenge-response protection to key interaction points like login, registration, and contact forms
- Traffic monitoring and analytics give you visibility into who is visiting your store, where they’re coming from, and whether their behavior patterns match legitimate shopping activity
- Automated alerts notify you when unusual traffic patterns are detected, so you can respond quickly to emerging attacks
These features work together as part of a broader security stack, rather than relying on any single detection method.
Conclusion
Bot attacks in 2026 are more advanced and more accessible to attackers than ever before. The combination of AI-powered automation, residential proxy networks, and bot-as-a-service platforms means that every Shopify store - regardless of size or industry - is a potential target.
The merchants who fare best are the ones who take a layered approach: combining rate limiting, fingerprinting, behavioral analysis, and continuous monitoring rather than relying on any single tool. Understanding the types of bots you face, the tactics they use, and the defenses available is the first step toward protecting your store, your inventory, and your customers.