Online Car Parts Store Ends Price & Product Data Scraping with DataDome

A leading car parts store with a huge online product database was frequently being scraped by competitors, sometimes leading to high CPU usage and website slowdowns. To protect its data from unwanted scraping and to control its traffic flow, the company chose DataDome. Scraper bots are now automatically detected and blocked, and middle-of-the-night website restarts are a thing of the past.

The Challenge: Bots Scraping Proprietary Data & Prices

The car part store’s network administrator is always looking for ways to improve the website’s layered security. To complete its firewall and intrusion prevention systems, security policies and security assessment, he and his team had been looking for a web-specific firewall. However, the available options seemed costly, and other projects took priority for some time.

“We know that price scraping is widespread in our industry, and you just have to assume that it’s happening to you,” he says. “More and more questions were coming up about whether competitors were scraping our prices, and we wanted to eliminate that if at all possible.”

While the unwanted bot traffic never created real emergencies, the team did notice performance issues from time to time. Every couple of months or so, the website would start to slow down, the network administrator would receive an alert about high CPU usage, and he would have to restart the ASP.net and IIS services to clear it up.

“Getting up to do that at three o’clock in the morning wasn’t particularly fun, so even though we didn’t experience any critical events in particular, we wanted to look into what was causing this and to add some extra security features,” he comments.

The Solution: Effective, Easy-to-Install Bot Protection

While researching bot protection solutions, both the network administrator and his manager simultaneously noticed DataDome. One of the attributes that particularly appealed to them was the ease of installation and configuration. “We didn’t want a month-long project that required constant reboots of our system, CDN configurations and changing DNS records,” he observes.

And did the implementation experience answer their expectations?

“Absolutely! In about two hours, we had DataDome turned on,” he attests.

The free trial period confirmed regular heavy scraping, with very cyclical attacks rotating IP addresses and countries.

The Results: Data Protection, Traffic Insight, & Peace of Mind

Today, DataDome blocks all unwanted scraper bots in real time, and competitive espionage is no longer a concern for the company. Neither is bot-driven on-call incidents at three in the morning, an indisputable benefit. And while the scrapers only rarely created significant performance problems, the network administrator is pleased that the website’s traffic is now more predictable.

“We just wanted to proactively add some extra security, and I don’t think we really ever knew how many bots were hitting our site—it was running fine 99% of the time,” he observes. “But now that we have DataDome and can look at the real metrics, we can see how much unnecessary traffic was actually perusing our site. That resource relief is a nice added benefit.”

He appreciates the detailed traffic insights the DataDome dashboard provides, and the ability to control what traffic is flowing. By default, the company allows all commercial bots, but obnoxious ones are easily blocked with a custom rule. Non-technical managers also like that DataDome can be toggled on and off at the switch of a button, should it be necessary (it never has).

“DataDome provides the extra layer of protection we were looking for, and the support is very good, with a monthly check-in to review our traffic and any interesting findings. There are no negative sides to DataDome, only positive,” our interviewee concludes.