Grinchbots Seize The Holiday Season: A Data Lesson For Retailers
By Dimitiri Vlachos, Devo Technology
It was Christmas and my nieces and nephews asked for just one thing: Hatchimals. I was desperate to find them, but everywhere I looked was sold out. I was in a pinch.
After some online sleuthing, things started to look up — a private seller had Hatchimals available for purchase on eBay. I got excited and purchased four, albeit at a significantly higher cost than I would have at a traditional brick-and-mortar store. It wasn’t until months later that I realized I had been had by a grinchbot.
While it was difficult for me to accept that I paid much more than retail prices for my nieces’ and nephews’ happiness, the real victim of the grinchbot was the retailer. It is a clear example of the impact of bots preying on consumers’ holiday wish lists and retailers not monitoring their sales and inventory closely — disrupting their ability to understand their customer, products, pricing and supply chain.
So how can retailers and consumers defeat machine learning-powered bots and algorithmic purchasing? While the answer is not so simple for product-starved consumers like me, product manufacturers and retailers can make it much harder for bot attacks to succeed by understanding how data can be leveraged for the good of the shopper.
Buy, Hoard, Sell (And Make Huge Profits), Repeat
Grinchbots, a.k.a. malicious bots, are automated software programs created by criminal entities. Their purpose is to buy items that are high in demand, hoard them for a period of time, then sell them at a premium on many of the same e-Commerce sites the original manufacturer uses in its retail channel.
Where once you purchased only from a traditional brick-and-mortar retailer, new markets are now ruled by hoarders who use bots to amass goods. How can retailers fight back? By deploying machine learning (ML) and advanced security analytics to quickly detect bots and protect inventory so the downstream brand is not affected.
Retailers Must Follow The Data
Beating bad bots, not only at Christmas but all year long, requires vigilance, and real-time access to data-driven analytics. For retailers to protect themselves against grinchbots, they need to closely monitor and understand their data so they receive immediate alerts about the activity of malicious bots. This intelligence enables them to protect their supply chain across all channels, renew pricing power, reduce supply chain surprises and improve relationships with consumers. The key to this transformation is data — data the retailer had in its systems all the time, but was hidden by slow analysis and siloed databases that reduced visibility into operations.
Retail businesses can stop grinchbots by using timely analysis of all operational data. Give your company a present this year: grant real-time access to critical data to every stakeholder. You won’t regret the expenditure, and the gift won’t wind up in the return pile after the holidays.
Dimitiri Vlachos is Vice President, Marketing at Devo Technology. He is focused on developing products, messaging and lead-generation strategies mapped to customer needs. With 20+ years of marketing and product experience at companies including Cisco, Riverbed and BBN, Vlachos builds teams that bring innovative solutions to market.