RebateKey Stops Automated Account Creation & Purchasing with DataDome

The Challenge: Automated Account Creation & Purchasing

RebateKey offers online shoppers direct access to great discounts for top-selling brands and products, primarily on Amazon. For sellers, the platform helps get their products in front of new buyers, generating marketing buzz and extra sales.

Unfortunately, ordinary shoppers weren’t the only ones taking advantage of RebateKey’s attractive offers. A growing number of visitors were displaying unusual behaviors, browsing the site in repetitive ways and making multiple purchases in rapid succession. The development team soon realized that certain operators were using bots to automate the whole process of creating new accounts, browsing products, making purchases, and claiming discounts.

“We want to only have real people use our website,” says Ian Sells, co-founder and CEO of RebateKey. “Even though these bots were making actual purchases, automated traffic is not what sellers expect from us. They expect a service, exposure to new buyers, and long-term increased sales. We’re not here to serve people who just make money off our platform by purchasing discounted items for resale. On top of that, if the bots get all the most interesting products, it ruins the experience for the real customers who come to our platform. They’re left with the impression that there’s nothing on offer, just because the bots were faster than them.”

For some time, the RebateKey development team attempted to mitigate the automated traffic with the help of their firewall, manual IP blocking and account deactivation. However, the job was becoming extremely time-consuming.

“As we were growing and bringing more awareness to our brand, we were getting increasingly hit by bots creating fake accounts, essentially abusing our platform,” Ian comments. “We were spending way too many man-hours dealing with bots, instead of developing our solution. We needed to find a better way to combat it.”

The Solution: Ultra-Easy Installation of Efficient Bot Detection

The task of finding a more sustainable bot mitigation solution fell on Julien Barbedette, Project Lead Developer at RebateKey. He was spending hours every week blocking IPs instead of doing actual development work, and wanted a solution they could test and implement fast. A must-have was a solution that understood Apache hosted websites bot protection.

“I searched for bot protection solutions on Google, and DataDome looked promising,” says Julien. “The installation was extremely easy. I created an account, installed the DataDome Apache module on our server, and it was basically up and running. In the free trial monitoring mode, we could see right away that the detection worked really well and would block the bots without affecting human traffic, so we just signed up for a subscription and activated the protection ourselves. Within a couple of hours, we could see the change in our traffic.”

Shortly after, a DataDome account manager reached out to RebateKey. Together, the two teams fine-tuned the configuration and made a few adjustments to prevent fake account creation and optimize the fake account creation protection, but overall, RebateKey’s implementation process was almost completely self-managed.

The Results: Clean Traffic & More Time for Product Development

In Julien’s words, “when bots are attacking you from every direction, it’s a bit of a nightmare.” That nightmare is now a thing of the past for RebateKey, whose DataDome dashboard uncovered even more undesirable traffic than they expected.

“We knew that bots were impacting our business, but didn’t realize to what extent,” Ian recognizes. “Seeing the DataDome reports, and how much we were actually being attacked, has been very helpful.”

“DataDome provides in-depth insights into our website traffic; not only bots, but where all our traffic is coming from,” Julien adds. “We discovered, for example, that we had a lot of traffic from a country RebateKey isn’t addressing. People behind their computers somehow managed to get hold of U.S. addresses and phone numbers, make purchases on our site, and retrieve the cashback money. It’s traffic we don’t want. Without DataDome, we’d need someone almost full-time to constantly monitor and manage this.”

Happily, manual traffic monitoring is no longer necessary, and the development team can focus their efforts on creating ever better experiences for RebateKey’s real customers.

“I hardly spend any time at all on bot mitigation anymore,” Julien confirms. “I’ll take a look at the dashboard in the morning, and if there’s been a peak of bot activity I may check out the details, but it’s just so comfortable to start the day calmly, knowing that we aren’t going to have any trouble with bots.” 

“It’s been great so far for our business,” Ian concludes.