Bots and Fake Users Abandon Shopping Carts, Costing Online Retailers $5.7 Billion a Year, New Study Finds

NEW YORK, May 23, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — Leader in go-to-market security CHEQreleased data from their latest study which found that e-commerce businesses were losing $5.7 billion in potential sales to bots and fake users who abandon carts. Cart abandonment programs often aim to deplete the amount of inventory available on a website, causing shoppers to shop elsewhere where the item is available. E-commerce related schemes can be implemented by malicious individuals, competitors, and click farms, but are also driven by large sophisticated bot networks.

This data was discovered by running thousands of cybersecurity tests on visitors to e-commerce websites around the world. Overall, 32% of direct and organic traffic to these retailer sites turned out to be invalid traffic (IVT), meaning they have no intention or ability to make a purchase or to interact with a website in a meaningful way.

“Retailers often lose potential business to cart abandonment,” said Guy Tytuniovich, CEO of CHEQ. “However, many retailers don’t have the ability to dig deeper into these numbers and determine which cart abandonments are from legitimate users and which are from bots. This can lead to massive disruptions when it comes to the customer experience, sales projections and data accuracy.

Currently, 69.8% of all carts are abandoned by buyers before checkout. Data from CHEQ shows that a significant portion of this comes from malicious scrapers and illegitimate human users.

These data are part of a larger whole CHEQ report which discusses the impact and scale of the fake web on e-commerce sites. The report revealed that in addition to billions lost due to bot cart abandonment, additional revenue was lost due to invalid ad clicks and organic traffic from bots and fake users.

Media Contact: Kerry Coppinger. kerry.c@cheq.ai

SOURCE VERIFICATION