Protecting your store from bots

You can activate bot protection to help prevent product inventories from primarily being sold to auto-checkout bots. Bot protection blocks known bots from your checkout, and slows down bot activity so that your customers have the opportunity to make purchases during flash sales.

If you want to request the bot protection feature for your online store, then contact Shopify Plus Support.

Considerations for using bot protection

Review the following considerations before using the bot protection feature:

  • Bot protection is available in your Shopify admin only after it's been activated. To activate bot protection for your online store, contact Shopify Plus support.
  • Only one bot protection event can be scheduled at a time.
  • The maximum duration for a bot protection event is 60 minutes.
  • The bot protection feature is available for the Online Store sales channel only. Bot protection for other sales channels isn't supported.
  • After a bot protection event ends, a new one can't be created for at least 15 minutes.

Schedule bot protection

You can schedule bot protection to start at a specific time and date. Your scheduled event begins at the time you select according to your store’s time zone, not your browser's time zone.

The maximum duration for a bot protection event is 60 minutes. To maximize the effectiveness of bot protection, you can schedule it at the same time as your flash sale. When you schedule bot protection, you can choose to protect all published products, or you can select up to 50 individual products that you want to protect.

Steps:

  1. If you haven't already activated bot protection for your online store, then contact Shopify Plus support to activate the feature.
  2. From your Shopify admin, go to Settings > Bot protection.
  3. Click Schedule protection.
  4. Enter a title, date, start time, and duration.
  5. Select Stop known bots from auto-completing checkouts.
  6. Optional: If you want to use a checkpoint challenge for the duration of your event, then select Require that all customers solve a checkpoint challenge before completing checkout.
  7. In the Products section, select whether you want to protect all published products or only specific products. If you choose to protect specific products, then use the Search Protect products field to add your products to the list of protected products. You can add a maximum of 50 individual products.
  8. Click Submit.

Customize the checkpoint page

You can customize the look of your checkpoint page by editing your theme code.

Steps

  1. From your Shopify admin, go to Online Store > Themes.
  2. Click the ... button > Edit code.
  3. If this is your first time customizing the checkpoint page, then create a checkpoint template by doing the following:
    1. Click Add a new template.
    2. Select checkpoint.
  4. In the Templates section, click checkpoint.liquid.
  5. Make changes to the template code.
  6. Click Save.

You can preview your custom checkout page by creating a new event and clicking Preview what your customers will see.

Deactivate bot protection

Bot protection deactivates automatically when the scheduled time ends. If enough customers have already purchased from your store, you can manually deactivate bot protection. To determine this, you need to track your order volume and decide whether you want to deactivate bot protection.

Steps:

  1. From your Shopify admin, go to Settings > Bot protection.
  2. Click the active event.
  3. Click Deactivate.
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