This bot is simply trying to get the final price (with tax and shipping) which is ridiculous because e-commerce storefronts should do that in the first place without going through the whole checkout process.<p>I always have found that kind of shady but it's probably known to increase conversions.<p>What I found interesting is that this an open attack vector for e-commerces. Multiple bots can hit a website and start adding items and start the checkout process. This basically creates an unprecedented cart behavior data influx that ruins any possible usage for data coming from legit customers. Maybe cleaning the data wouldn't be that hard but if someone knows what they are doing they can really make it hard (separate IPs, emails and cart behavior)<p>I doubt Shopify or Magento have anything to prevent this.
For people saying this to calculate the final price with shipping and tax, it's not (or at least not entirely). It is for this new sales conversion dark pattern where prices aren't listed until you add to cart.<p>Ebay sellers are particularly bad offenders:
<a href="https://www.ebay.com/itm/Open-Box-Certified-Samsung-Galaxy-13-3-4K-Ultra-HD-Touch-Screen-Chromeboo/203028862820?epid=21037915306&hash=item2f45769764:g:IM4AAOSwq4Nesuii" rel="nofollow">https://www.ebay.com/itm/Open-Box-Certified-Samsung-Galaxy-1...</a>
That sparked a funny idea in my head, what if we tricked product managers industry wide to follow KPIs and A/B tests that resulted in a better user experience for consumers, instead of experiences that coincidentally slightly upticked "engagement".<p>Because it seems like this mystery shopper is already doing that.
robots.txt, man, if you don't want search engines to visit certain part of your page, use robots.txt!<p>Once heard a tale of an angry site owner calling Google (back when Google itself was novel) - Google deleted his whole website! Turned out he had "DELETE" button in each page, which generated plain GET request. So Googlebot visited the site, followed links to every page, and then of course followed every link that generated GET requests - because they are supposed to be safe.<p>Don't be like that site owner.
Protip: You will often get a discount coupon if you go through most of the checkout process(need to provide email), but wait a couple days. Many stores automate abandoned checkout promotions.
It's just price data collection. In particular, MAP policies can be skirted by not publishing a final price but having a price below MAP in the cart which is a common tactic that online sellers utilize. By pretending to walk through the cart, all sorts of data about pricing, taxes, etc. can be learned. It's not entirely uncommon to see different prices at different times, for different user agents, for different locations, etc. Used to work for a company that build huge price collection systems and built many of them...
The real problem with this is from the merchant side of things.<p>This bot generates thousands of "Abandoned Carts" on one of our sites... thousands...<p>We send cart reminders to Abandoned Carts after a few days, sometimes with a coupon offer to complete checkout.<p>This bot is responsible for thousands of bounced emails each week, which impacts our metrics with Mandrill among other things.<p>Maybe we shouldn't care, but it's sloppy and ruins all sorts of stats we keep track of regarding cart abandonment rates, recapture rates and more.
Are there legal implications to Google bots transacting with websites under false pretenses?<p>I mean their normal web crawler identifies itself as such. Here, I feel like they're committing (very) minor fraud by putting in fake shopper information and actively hiding their identity. Not a big deal if it were just some Joe Schmoe somewhere, but at their scale might it border on harassment? The robot equivalent of a prank call?
Genuine question, is this not considered a DoS attack?<p>Let's imagine I have my online stock linked to limited physical items/assets, ex tickets for a show, which will get reserved for a period of time. This will be preventing genuine clients from buying them.
Would it be too much for Google to program the bot to get the final price, and then delete all the items from the cart? Seems rather rude, even for Google.
I wouldn't fault them for that, I've observed some sites most likely are gaming the system by detecting and providing Google bots with artificially lower prices so that they would appear in indexes summaries and then when you access the product, its real price is always higher than the one reported in the index.
I used to work at a company that provided APIs used for search/personalization/autosuggest for a whole bunch of huge e-commerce companies. Since the entire integration with the customer site was API based, we worked off of tracking pixels, API requests and cookies to determine shopping behaviour. A lot of this went into determining things like ranking (If someone searches "Tshirt" what shows up on the first page and in what order etc.)<p>Since we were only running search and not payment processing, the tracking pixel/API for "Add to Cart" was a big thing for us. The whole product ran on revenue-share so we were paid per X ATCs<p>Interesting to see if any of the customers were affected by bots doing ATC and how it was handled if it was.
Digital shopping cart abandonment/Inventory Exhaustion/Hoarder bots is an interesting type of DDOS.<p>There's a popular moment of people using it atm
<a href="https://heavy.com/news/2020/06/shopping-card-abandonment-tiktok/" rel="nofollow">https://heavy.com/news/2020/06/shopping-card-abandonment-tik...</a>
I think I've seen most Google's technologies dissected and/or explained in detail over the years. Lots of their own papers too. If you look into how and what they're doing regarding data collection, including scraping, there's nothing.
Funny, a one quick gig I did in my college years was to write a shopping bot protection against "guaranteed lowest price" scraper like tigerdirect, or RFD.<p>Back then, the goal was exactly the opposite.
When and why did news cease being news and start being short stories and opinion? This entire article could have been cut down to the last few paragraphs and nothing of value would have been lost.<p>Look at The New York Times in 1921 [0]. Generally the stories are factual and to the point. The entire front page seems to be pure news. There's very little storytelling here, at most there are a few timelines of events.<p>Look at The New York Times today [1]. There's a bunch of factual and useful Coronavirus information but ~15% of the page is dedicated to "Opinion", the second article appears to be pure speculation, the third article is a bunch of storytime fluff around a little bit of news and the front page has a mix of actual news and opinion pieces being passed off as news.<p>When did this happen? Why? Did people lose interest in actual news? Is there less actual news to report?<p>Perhaps this is regional? Take for example the story about the San Quentin prison. NYTimes [2] has the same drawn out nonsense as this Google story while Aljazeera [3] adds a lot of background but sticks to factual reporting.<p>[0]: <a href="https://archive.org/details/NYTimes_jul16_31_1921" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/NYTimes_jul16_31_1921</a><p>[1]: <a href="http://archive.is/oiiXU" rel="nofollow">http://archive.is/oiiXU</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/30/us/san-quentin-prison-coronavirus.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/30/us/san-quentin-prison-cor...</a><p>[3]: <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/07/san-quentin-prison-sees-600-coronavirus-cases-5-days-200701192059040.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/07/san-quentin-prison-se...</a>
> When The Wall Street Journal contacted Google in June, a spokesman at the internet giant, after a few days of digging, provided an update: The mystery shopper is a bot of its own creation.<p>> The purpose: making sure the all-in price for the product, including tax and shipping, matches the listing on its Google Shopping platform or in advertisements. It wasn’t to cause angst to merchants due to thousands of abandoned carts.<p>> “We use automated systems to ensure consumers are getting accurate pricing information from our merchants,” a company spokesman said. “This sometimes leads to merchants seeing abandoned carts as a result of our system testing whether the price displayed matches the price at checkout.”<p>You'd think they could have better identified themselves in accounts they were creating rather than creating this mysterious "John Smith" persona. Maybe "GoogleBot PriceVerifier" would have been a better choice.<p>edit: remove my inaccurate confusion about something, and fix quotes that I'd copied from a plagiarized version of the article.