With Black Friday and Cyber Monday quickly approaching, retailers are gearing up, stocking inventory, hiring seasonal staff and even upping their cybersecurity. In this day and age, shoppers must be extremely careful when making purchases online, as bots are more sophisticated and damaging than ever before.
So-called Grinch bots buy up popular toys in bulk at Christmas and resell them at a profit. They affected as much as 97% of traffic to ecommerce sites in the week ending Cyber Monday, Radware claimed. Now Congress is considering legislation for the third time to combat the threat. Will a new law or technology solve the problem?
Marketing fraud ─ including skewed analytics, ad fraud, affiliate fraud and lead fraud ─ is a growing problem for online businesses in every industry, and it’s more pronounced over the busy holiday shopping season. Juniper Research estimates that in 2019, advertisers around the world will lose $42 billion of ad spend to fraud.
Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook Messenger’s chatbot revolution Monday at the Facebook F8 conference with the launch of bots for the Messenger Platform, and ecommerce merchants and platforms have already hopped on board. 1-800-FLOWERS.COM and Staples announced this week that they will use Facebook Messenger as a customer support tool, LivePerson, and Aspect Software said they will offer Facebook Messenger integration, and Shopify became the first ecommerce platform to offer integration with the new platform.