On Celio’s E-Commerce Platform, Bot Traffic is Managed in Automatic Mode

“Thanks to our SEO work, we have always been aware of the various bots that visited our site,” says Fabien Papegay, IT Production and E-Commerce Operations Manager, who is in charge of ensuring that Celio’s infrastructure and services are operating optimally.

Controlling this automated traffic is a high-stakes challenge, as the digital platform is at the heart of Celio’s infrastructure. It powers not only the websites in every country where the company is present, but also many in-store services such as store-to-web, click and collect, and discount and loyalty program management: it truly is an omnichannel system.

“The impact of bot traffic could be significant, for example, if the timing was bad like during the sales period, or if the bot in question was simply not wanted,” Fabien Papegay explains. “Automated traffic could lead to a decrease in the overall performance of the platform, to the point of causing service interruptions.”

For example, a few months ago, the company experienced a significant attack. The bot traffic was so massive that it saturated the hard disk logs and crashed the platform.

Before installing the DataDome solution, the Celio teams handled bot traffic on a case-by-case basis at the web access level, analyzing incoming traffic and partially or completely blocking unwanted bots. But manual monitoring and blocking requires a lot of resources, and the teams were powerless against attacks which used vast numbers of different IP addresses.

At the same time, Celio’s Analytics & digital team was increasingly concerned about the legitimacy of the bots that were scanning the site in ever-increasing numbers.

It became clear that a technical solution was needed in order to properly control the automated traffic, and to stabilize and secure the infrastructure.

The choice fell on DataDome, whose onboarding and customer success teams supported the deployment. The only bot protection solution available in SaaS mode, DataDome detects bots in real time and uses a combination of artificial intelligence and machine learning to decide in less than 2 milliseconds whether or not a request should be allowed.

Indeed, although DataDome is designed to relieve its users of daily bot traffic management, they can adapt the AI’s decisions with best-in-class customization options. The custom rules function allows them, for example, to block human traffic from certain countries, or to give access to partner bots only in specific circumstances.

“This function allows us to finely filter our traffic, deciding which bots we want to allow and blocking the others,” says Fabien Papegay. “Sometimes, partners contact us because they have tried to do something on the site and have been blocked by DataDome. This helps us become aware of their activity, validate their requests and allow-list them if it’s warranted, or on the contrary to refuse requests that we don’t consider legitimate.”