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Bots are becoming a bigger problem for e-commerce brands, but not all bot traffic is easy to spot. Some bots distort analytics, spam forms, create fake abandoned carts, flood site search, and interfere with tools like Klaviyo, making it harder for merchants to understand what’s actually happening on their site.
To better explain how bot mitigation works, Amelia, our in-house Merchant Advisor sat down with James, CEO of Render Better, to break down the difference between bot detection, mitigation, and elimination, how Render Better compares to Shopify and Cloudflare, and why a managed, site-specific approach can make a meaningful difference for merchants.
Amelia: Hi James! As our In-House Merchant Advisor, I know bots are a huge issue for our clients. I was wondering if I could ask you some questions about Render Better’s Bot Mitigation that we can share with everyone?
James: Yes, let’s do it!
Amelia: Ok, let’s dive in. What’s the difference between bot detection, bot mitigation, and bot elimination?
James: Bot detection is basically identifying that bots are on your site. That part is actually relatively easy. Shopify, for example, already gives you analytics where you can filter and see bot traffic in your data. Bot mitigation is the broader process. I think of it as the umbrella that includes both detection and elimination.
You need to detect bots before you can do anything about them. Then bot elimination is the actual process of stopping bots from impacting the website, whether that’s blocking them outright or putting up a challenge like a CAPTCHA. Usually bots can’t get past those kinds of challenges, so that becomes part of the elimination process.
Amelia: Shopify is now rolling out a bot protection toggle. What’s the difference between that tool and Render Better?
James: Yeah, that’s a really common question. We also get asked a lot about the difference between Render Better and Cloudflare, so I’ll touch on both. Shopify’s bot protection toggle is a feature inside Shopify settings. What it does is place a CAPTCHA challenge at checkout for up to 60 minutes to make automated checkouts harder. That can definitely help reduce fraud and automated checkout attacks. But the big difference is that Shopify’s feature is only focused on checkout, and it only runs temporarily. Most bot problems don’t last 60 minutes. They’re happening 24/7.
Bots also impact far more than checkout. They can pollute analytics, spam forms, create fake abandoned carts, flood site search with junk queries, and fill third-party tools with bad data. So while Shopify’s feature can help in a narrow area, Render Better protects the entire site continuously.
"Most bot problems don’t last 60 minutes. They’re happening 24/7.”
Amelia: So then, how does Render Better compare to Cloudflare?
James: Cloudflare provides tools for bot mitigation, but for their self-serve platform, it’s still largely up to the merchant to figure out what’s happening and configure the tools themselves.
What Render Better provides is both. Render Better's firewall is built on top of Cloudflare platform, so we're able to utilize the advanced the bot tools Cloudflare provides in combination with our powerful user monitoring to identify and eliminate bots. We’re actively identifying malicious traffic patterns and then blocking or challenging that traffic. It’s not a self-service tool. It’s a managed service.
"We’re actively identifying malicious traffic patterns and then blocking or challenging that traffic.”
Amelia: OK! Now please give us a deep dive into Render Better’s approach.
James: Render Better uses something called real user monitoring, or RUM. Originally, that system was built to monitor site performance and identify UX issues, but it turned out to also be extremely effective for detecting bots. We’re able to see things like browser signatures, time zones, traffic origins, VPN or data center usage, and behavioral patterns.
For example, we’ve seen bots that identify themselves as Facebook browser traffic while the actual traffic is originating from data centers in countries the brand doesn't even serve. We also combine those technical signals with e-commerce behavior. We look at questions like: Is this traffic adding products to cart? Is it making purchases? Is it behaving like a real shopper? If traffic isn’t doing the kinds of things real customers do, we can group it into patterns and identify likely bot activity. From there, we either block or challenge that traffic.
"We look at questions like: Is this traffic adding products to cart? Is it making purchases? Is it behaving like a real shopper?”
Amelia: So why do sophisticated bots still bypass traditional protections?
James: Platforms like Shopify and Cloudflare are in a difficult position because they have to protect millions of websites without damaging the user experience. If they get too aggressive and block too much traffic, they risk impacting real shoppers. That creates a much bigger problem for merchants. So their protections tend to sit somewhere in the middle ground. Not nothing, but not extremely aggressive either.
Where Render Better differs is that we take a much more customized approach for each site. We collect significantly more data points, and we work closely with merchants to make sure that when we roll out new rules, we’re not blocking legitimate users. It’s a much more white-glove approach.
"Platforms like Shopify and Cloudflare are in a difficult position because they have to protect millions of websites without damaging the user experience.”
Amelia: I would imagine Render Better’s Shopify expertise gives you an advantage?
James: Yeah, definitely. Having six years of building on Shopify helps because we understand how the platform works and where bots tend to attack. But honestly, one of the biggest advantages is the network effect from working across many stores. As we onboard more customers, our signals get better because we can see when the same bots are attacking multiple sites at once. An individual merchant usually can’t see those broader patterns on their own.
Amelia: OK, let’s get into the really exciting stuff. What kind of results are you seeing with clients?
James: We’re seeing really strong results. For one customer, we’re currently blocking around 8 million bots per day. Before mitigation, their analytics and conversion reporting were heavily distorted because so much fake traffic was flooding the site.
In general, we see most e-commerce stores dealing with somewhere between 15% and 30% bad bot traffic. And in some cases, it’s much higher. We’ve seen stores where 60% to 70% of traffic was bots What’s important is that we’re talking about bad bots specifically, not legitimate crawlers like Google.
“We see most e-commerce stores dealing with somewhere between 15% and 30% bad bot traffic.”
Amelia: And are all of Render Better’s clients being impacted by bots?
James: Yes, absolutely. One hundred percent of our RUM clients are impacted by bots. Every client we’ve worked with has had some level of malicious bot traffic. The percentage varies a lot. On the low end, maybe it’s around 5% of traffic. On the high end, we’ve seen stores where the majority of traffic was bot-driven. Even stores in the same industry can have wildly different levels of exposure.
"One hundred percent of our RUM clients are impacted by bots.”
Amelia: How can you prove your bot mitigation solution is actually working?
James: Well, our dashboard says it all. But one of the main metrics we track is challenge solve rate. Basically, when we present traffic with a CAPTCHA or challenge, we measure what percentage successfully completes it. Usually the solve rate for malicious traffic is extremely low, often under a few percent, which is a strong signal that the blocked traffic wasn’t legitimate users.
We also look at business outcomes. Are conversion rates stable or improving? Are sales unaffected? Are spam submissions decreasing? Are abandoned carts getting cleaner? Are tools like Klaviyo collecting less junk data? Usually customers already have a specific pain point they want solved, so we work directly with them to measure whether those issues improve.
Amelia: So what’s next for Render Better and your RUM platform?
James: Bot mitigation is only one part of what we do. We’re continuing to expand our Real User Monitoring platform to better understand site performance, user behavior, and customer experience overall. The more visibility we have into how real users behave, the better our bot mitigation becomes. If traffic is just sitting there not moving a cursor, not interacting, not behaving like a shopper, those are strong signals. So as we improve the broader monitoring platform, it naturally strengthens bot detection and mitigation too. Exciting times!
If you are ready for a free trial of Render Better’s RUM Analytics and want to understand the impact bots are having on your business, get in touch!