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.
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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.
