How to stop shopping bots?

[movieseals]

The captcha module is a great addition, integrates well and works wonderfully to curtail SPAM. However, do you guys have a solution for the annoying shopping bots that fill carts day in and day out? I have blocked a bunch of IPs but at some point, the sheer amount of blocks gets overwhelming and I guess will eventually slow down the site as the server has to read the htaccess every time it gets a request... Any suggestion is appreciated.

[piet]

I deleted about 1300 shopping carts this week. What is the meaning of such a bot? Someone should have benefits because of such actions. I'm very interested in a workable solution as well.

[movieseals]

I use CSF with cpHulk on CentOS 6.9. But I have not had much success stopping bots from adding stuff to cart with it.

[lesley]

There is no stopping them unless you use a 3rd party service, but at the same time you can have users caught up in them and they will abandon your site. So its a tough choice....

[datakick]

Is it worth the trouble? I would just install some module to delete abandoned carts from database after some time period. Maybe set it up to delete carts of anonymous visitors only, so you can keep valuable data of your customers interests/buy intents.

[Generaal]

Spam emails from Russia, IP ban, fail2ban, captcha, all running and working, but they come over and over.

[vincentdenkspel]

@datakick Do you recommend one ?

[Generaal]

I think, they are active before I running the whole bunch to prevent and they are already in the email system.

[thirtybirbs]

What is the purpose of a "shopping bot"? Are you sure they aren't just abandoned customers or people checking out your site?

[BlindPenguin]

I don't think there are shopping bots. It's just some random bots, that keep following links. If your theme has "Add to Cart" links, then they will follow it. Most of the time it's the button in category view. Those bots ignore "no-follow" and "robots.txt". Blocking them will not help, because there are thousands, if not millions of them. The only way to stop it, is to remove Add-to-Cart Buttons that are defined as links or replace them with a JS based button.