Impact of Bots on eCommerce and Bot Detection Methods

Tummalapalli Sudhamsh Reddy, Senior Data Scientist, Kayak Software

Abstract: 

By some estimates, almost half of the web traffic is due to bots. Some search engines such as Google or Bing, as well as other affiliate sites have bots that scrape eCommerce websites such as Wayfair or Amazon for information which are encouraged, as this helps drive traffic to the site. Other bots are much more malicious and they focus on activities such as stealing content from the site via web scraping (Price Scraping or Content Scraping), form fraud, inventory locking, click fraud, credit card fraud etc. Some of the impacts of this kind of malicious activity are that they can skew website analytics information, allow competitors to steal information, commit ad fraud, and can also impact the user experience of the site by slowing it down by generating traffic that increases server loads and wastes bandwidth.

In this talk we will focus on:

  • Some of the impacts of such bots on eCommerce sites
  • The different types of bots that exist
  • Some features and methods that can be used to detect such bots

Tummalapalli Sudhamsh Reddy, Senior Data Scientist, Kayak

Dr. Tummalapalli Sudhamsh Reddy is a senior data Scientist at Kayak Software Corp, which is one of the leading travel metasearch engines in the world. Amongst his many roles at Kayak, Sudhamsh is responsible for the bot detection and search results ranking. Before joining Kayak, Sudhamsh developed fraud detection models for detecting credit card fraud at ACI Worldwide Inc. He has previously been a guest scientist at Fermi National Accelerator Lab and Brookhaven National Lab.

Dr. Reddy obtained his M.S and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Arlington.

BibTeX
@conference {215325,
author = {Tummalapalli Sudhamsh Reddy},
title = {Impact of Bots on {eCommerce} and Bot Detection Methods},
year = {2018},
address = {Atlanta, GA},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = may
}