Zoro Achieves Clean Data & Strong Security with DataDome & Google Cloud
Zoro, an e-commerce company that sells business supplies, equipment, and tools, chose DataDome to help address increasing undesirable bot traffic impacting their ability to generate actionable web analytics and the customer experience. After implementing DataDome’s automated bot protection service, Zoro saw a measurable drop in unwanted bot traffic, helping to improve analytics accuracy, reduce resources needed to address the bots and enabling the team to focus on higher value work.
The challenge: Addressing fake crawlers, & automated unwelcome bots targeting Zoro’s website
Since it was founded 14 years ago, Zoro has experienced dazzling growth, reaching over a billion dollars in revenue. However, as the company expanded, so too did its exposure to bad bot traffic. Their website, like many other e-commerce sites, increasingly experienced unwanted bot traffic. While legitimate crawlers from search engines like Google provide a beneficial service allowing users to more easily find Zoro.com, other bots can have a detrimental impact.
“Over time, we noticed an increasing bot presence on our site,” says Tim Daneliuk, Chief Architect at Zoro. “While we expected traffic from legitimate bots like Google or Bing, it became clear that we were also dealing with a high volume of malicious bots. This posed issues for our web analytics team, as the data was so ‘noisy’ with bot traffic that it became challenging to accurately assess our website’s performance.”
In response, Zoro took several steps to mitigate the problem. The Zoro team frequently monitored bot traffic and would respond manually when attacks were identified. Tim explains, “Our core engineering teams would block IP addresses or apply temporary fixes. It felt like an emergency room situation, constantly addressing the crisis of the day rather than finding a sustainable, long-term solution.”
Zoro then began looking for an external solution to address this by reducing bot traffic and restoring the ability to run actionable analytics, while reducing the operational burden on their teams.
The solution: AI-powered bot protection with seamless integration with Google Cloud
So, Zoro began looking for an online bot detection platform that would block unwanted bots, let in the “good” bots, and integrate seamlessly with Zoro’s existing infrastructure, particularly their Google Cloud Platform.
“When I joined Zoro, we made a strategic decision to move toward a microservices architecture, and Google Cloud was ahead of the game, particularly with Kubernetes,” Tim says. “Our platform now runs on Google Cloud, so any tool we were considering had to work within that environment.”
This focus on integration made DataDome an ideal choice. The solution not only offered robust bot detection thanks to its advanced machine learning algorithms but also provided smooth integration with Apigee, Google Cloud’s API management tool, ensuring uninterrupted protection of Zoro’s APIs from bot attacks. “Our API gateways were an important entry point for bots, and having a solution that could address the unwanted bots without adding latency was critical,” says Tim.
DataDome’s AI-driven approach, which analyzes 100% of requests in real time to detect and block bad bots, was another major selling point for Zoro. The platform’s advanced machine learning algorithms differentiate between good and bad bots ensuring precise, proactive protection. DataDome’s well-known and respected brand among its customers also helped make the case to move forward.
The results: Measurable bot traffic reduction & improved analytics
The journey began with a POC that enabled Zoro to assess DataDome’s capabilities in real-life conditions. Zoro works with many third parties using automation to extract website content. The Zoro team was able to easily customize the settings to allow permitted automation while blocking undesired bots. “We were impressed with the results,” Tim says. “The platform identified and blocked bad bots in ways that our previous methods couldn’t even touch.”
Once the contract was finalized, Zoro moved quickly to deploy DataDome across their systems. Zoro immediately saw positive results. The day the platform went live in production, Zoro’s Google Analytics traffic dropped by 25-30%. The Cloud Security and Web Analytics teams were delighted. “I remember the Head of Web Analytics contacting me about a week after implementation to say ‘I love DataDome! Thank you for making this happen!’ Simply because his team could do their job more seamlessly than they could in the past,” explains Tim. Indeed, Zoro can now more effectively draw on its data to analyze customer behavior.
Beyond the obvious technical improvements, DataDome’s automated protection has reduced operational pressure on Zoro’s engineering teams previously spent addressing unwanted bots. “Ongoing management is minimal. We check the reports daily, but we largely don’t need to intervene in the event of increased bot activity since DataDome is identifying it automatically,” Tim says.
Finally, Tim highlights the collaborative nature of the relationship: “DataDome has been a strong partner. They understand what it takes to support an organization like ours. The product has worked as we had hoped and we are pleased with the results. When we have found cases of new ‘bot threats’, DataDome has quickly identified them so we can mitigate impact.”
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