How to Stop Scalpers: Everything you need to Understand

Due to the economics of demand and supply, there has been the emergence of scalpers. Scalpers aim to achieve the purchase of many limited-edition products at the first line and sell them later at a profit. Scalpers use scalper bots to get these products in bulk immediately after the producers or websites release them, later reselling them at eBay or similar sites. The common target of scalpers is usually on offers on electronic products and tickets.

Scalper bots have numerous disadvantages to the website and the users. For example, their traffic can affect the website’s performance, speed and frustrate human users. Therefore, it’ll be essential to control them and keep them off your sites. It’s usually a daunting task to prevent scalpers, but this article explains detecting and how to stop scalpers.

What are Scalper Bots?

Many scalpers have automated the scalping process using scalper bots, which are essential in automatically executing scalping tasks on different websites. The tools help target a particular site and monitor it before purchasing bulk limited-edition products from specific websites. The automatic execution of the process makes it simple and faster than the manual processes the human users execute.

However, these boots have numerous disadvantages for users and website owners, as they impact the website’s speed and performance. With the appropriate technology and implementation of security strategies, you can stop them, thus protecting your website from scalping.

Is Scalping Illegal?

It might not be appropriate to rely on legal platforms to keep your websites from scalping, as in most states, scalping is not illegal. It allows for different forms of scalping, such as ticket scalping, and there are no regulations on selling these products or services at a higher price. Therefore, it’s imperative to avoid depending on the legal frameworks to protect your websites from scalpers since when they sell your goods or tickets at an inflated price, it may harm your brand.

How to Detect Scalpers in Your Web Analytics

Before you consider the proper way on how to stop scalpers, it’ll be vital to ensure you have the appropriate ways of detecting the scalpers hitting your websites. Below are some of the parameters you can use to check and detect the scalpers on your website manually:

  • Traffic trends

It’ll be important to constantly check the traffic on your website to ensure that it’s always normal. If you realize an abnormal spike in your websites’ traffic, it’s a clear indication that scalpers bots are hitting your websites. Especially if the hike occurs in some odd hour or durations such as Black Friday or when you’re expecting to release an offer.

  • Bounce rate

A normal website should be free from abnormal lows and highs bounce rates; however, it raises a red flag when you realize strange highs and lows. This scenario signifies the presence of a lot of scalpers bots on your website. For example, the bots can hit a specific website’s page and switches the address IP this making it appear to have a bounce of rate 100%

  • Server performance

Every website owner would want to have an efficient and fast responding website, to enhance the user experience. However, when scalpers or other bots attack your website, it leads to heavy traffic on the site. This heavy traffic may cause your website to slow down, thus influencing its performance. A poor-performing and low-speed webpage is a significant indicator of the presence of scalper bots on your website.

  • Presence of suspicious IPS or geo-locations

Your websites should only display the bots that you know and have been doing business or interacting with. Scalper bots come with a different IP address, which helps to access your site easily. Thus, suspicious IPS and geo-location is an indicator of many scalper bots on the site.

These are the main indicators of the presence of scalping activities on your website. Nonetheless, it’s essential to understand that some sophisticated scalper bots can generate user-like signatures, realistic and related IP addresses in your website analysis tool. It’ll be good to choose an appropriate bot management tool that’ll be vital in providing the full visibility and intent of the different bot activities.

How to Stop Scalpers

Most websites and companies have found it challenging to stop the activity of scalpers on their websites due to their sophisticated and advanced designs. However, with the right technology and implementation, you can stop their actions on your websites. Let’s look at the suitable ways on how to stop scalpers.

  • Using anti-scalper bot softwares

The anti-scalper softwares are special tools designers have to stop or prevent the activities of scalper bots on any website. They work by determining the real traffic and the intent of the bots on your websites. The tools show all the bots and the internet, thus making it easy to make a real-time solution and decision by restricting the access of the scalpers to your websites.

  • Browser validation

Some scalpers usually pretend to run a certain browser and block the web analytics from detecting it as it goes through the cycle of user agents. Using the browser validation will ensure that every visitor to the browsers provides the true identity and intent. Therefore, it restricts the bots, which mimic the human user’s behavior patterns. Additionally, the website owners or companies can use the Captcha strategy as an alternative.

  • Reputation analysis

It’s an essential mechanism in stopping scalpers from any website as it analyzes the reputation of the bots before allowing access to the site. The strategy provides a database with the different technical or behavior patterns and IPs addresses of the different bots. It enables you to identify the known bots that you can allow to access your site. Alternatively, you can quickly stop the activities of bots you don’t recognize, such as scalper bots.

  • Machine learning behavior analysis

This behavior analysis strategy plays a vital role in distinguishing between the patterns of human users and bots. The bots will have different behavior to the human users, which you can’t realize easily. Analyzing metrics, such as website engagement, mouse movements, and URL requests will be essential to discover the malicious bots like the scalper bot and stop their activities on your websites.

Wrapping up

Scalpers can be a great source of annoyance to most website users and wonders. Using an automated scalper bot to purchase bulk limited-edition goods on a targeted website affects your website’s performance and speed. It’s challenging to stop the activities of scalpers on your site due to the complexity and sophistication of their design.

However, after detecting them on your websites, you can choose the right method on how to stop scalpers based on web analytics. The right and proper application of the method will help to keep the scalpers of your site. You can choose to use reputation analysis, browser validations, captcha, and other website security strategies to stop the activities of scalpers on your site.

 

Dharmesh is Co-Founder of TechnoFizi and a passionate blogger. He loves new Gadgets and Tools. He generally covers Tech Tricks, Gadget Reviews etc in his posts. Beside this, He also work as a SEO Analyst at TechnoFizi Solutions.

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