Bot management Retail & e-commerce Scraping

How 1001Pneus Blocked Competitor Price Scrapers & Reclaimed Its Competitive Edge

Paige Tester, Director of Content Marketing

Last update: 20 Oct, 2026 | min

Up to 67% of peak traffic was malicious bots,

all now blocked automatically before reaching infrastructure

6 country storefronts

with fully secure website performance

50-person IT, sales, marketing, and pricing team freed from bot firefighting,

now focused on growth instead of incident response

1001Pneus is France’s second-largest online tire retailer, with six country-specific storefronts serving customers across France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Italy, and Spain. With a lean team of about 50 people and over €100M in annual revenue, the company has built its competitive edge on product breadth with thousands of tire references across every possible size and precise, competitive pricing. In a market where price is everything, that edge made 1001Pneus a prime target.

The challenge: Bots were winning the price war

Tire e-commerce is intensely price-driven. Competitors rely on automated bots to scrape pricing data across thousands of product pages, adjusting their own listings in real time to stay one step ahead. For 1001Pneus, the first warning signs came as a performance problem: resource usage would spike without explanation, server resources would buckle under surges of traffic that weren’t converting to sales.

Thomas Beaupertuis, the CTO and CISO at 1001Pneus, suspected bots. To confirm it, along with his team, he built a honeypot on one of the site’s Ajax endpoints. The trap was triggered almost immediately.

"We saw very high peaks of CPU and resource consumption on our website. We started thinking it might be bots or scraping. So I created a honeypot on our Ajax endpoint to see if bots would fall into it, and they did. It was confirmed very quickly."

Thomas Beaupertuis

CTO and CISO at 1001Pneus

The bots were quite sophisticated and rotated through large pools of residential IPs, constantly shifting location and identity to evade detection. At peak, it is estimated that up to half of the site’s total traffic load was bots, hammering non-cached product pages, generating massive server strain, and creating operational chaos across teams.

"The problem is that they are hiding behind residential IPs. We are not able to block one specific IP range or one specific location because they are changing all the time. And because price is very important in this industry, they are putting a lot of effort into having large IP ranges."

Thomas Beaupertuis

CTO and CISO at 1001Pneus

The team tried to fight back with WAF and custom detection rules based on country, timing, and user agent patterns. The result was a whack-a-mole problem: rules that blocked bots also blocked real customers. And as the bots evolved, increasingly powered by AI, the rules required constant maintenance that a lean team simply couldn’t sustain.

"We tried to block it ourselves, but it was too complex and too difficult. The more time passed, the harder it got to catch bots and distinguish them from our real customers. We didn't have the experience or the science behind detection, and we are a limited team."

Thomas Beaupertuis

CTO and CISO at 1001Pneus

The solution: Adaptive protection built for a lean team

One concern held Thomas back from committing sooner: would a solution built for large enterprises actually work for a lean team? As a company of 50 people generating €100M in annual revenue, they needed something that would adapt to their size and setup, not the other way around. DataDome proved it could. From implementation to daily use, the platform required no dedicated security team to manage, scaled across six country domains without added complexity, and delivered the same level of protection regardless of company size.

A simple Google search during vendor evaluation led Thomas to DataDome. He booked a demo and signed within the same quarter. What sealed the decision wasn’t just the technology; it was DataDome’s willingness to adapt to 1001Pneus’s specific setup, six-country footprint, and the unique dynamics of the tire market.

"What made the difference was that DataDome adapted to our specific case and our specific needs. The other companies we evaluated were less adaptive to the way we wanted to implement the solution and work with us. For a team like ours, new to this kind of protection, that flexibility mattered a lot."

Thomas Beaupertuis

CTO and CISO at 1001Pneus

Implementation was straightforward with DataDome walking the company through every stage, including a two-week calibration period during which the platform learned 1001Pneus’s traffic patterns before shifting into active blocking mode. Along the way, the implementation process surfaced previously unknown issues on 1001Pneus’s own infrastructure.

“Overall it was very easy. We even discovered some issues in our own website through the implementation process — so in a way it was a good thing. Everything was very understandable, very transparent. I didn’t know what to expect, but everything went smoothly.”

The results: Calm, protected, and ready to grow

The transformation in the security coverage was immediate. The resource usage spikes stopped and the server strain disappeared. Attacks still arrive, but they’re invisible, absorbed by DataDome before they ever reach 1001Pneus’s infrastructure. Thomas said the comparison between before DataDome and after is very significant. The relief extended well beyond the security team. IT no longer scrambles to stabilize the site during scraping surges. Marketing no longer has to rethink campaigns because the website was unavailable. Teams that once spent hours investigating bot incidents now focus on building tools, improving the product, and growing the business.

"Before, when bots were crawling, the website could lag or go down and it created a lot of mess for our internal servers. Now they are doing tasks that are not linked to these issues. More meaningful work. More things that actually move the business forward."

Thomas Beaupertuis

CTO and CISO at 1001Pneus

One unexpected discovery: Germany and Belgium, smaller markets for 1001Pneus, were also heavily targeted by scrapers. DataDome’s cross-domain visibility surfaced these scrapers, which was a realization for the team at 1001Pneus. Thomas and his team use the DataDome Bot Protect dashboard daily to monitor blocked threats by country, time, and type across all six storefronts.

"The number of attempts to crawl our prices changed our vision of our international presence and where threats actually come from. We are using the dashboard every day, and in a few seconds I can see what was blocked today, yesterday, and the previous week. It's a very precious tool."

Thomas Beaupertuis

CTO and CISO at 1001Pneus

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