We wanted to provide some insight into what Shopify Bot Protection is, why it’s important and the impact it has on the sneaker industry specifically.
For starters, the bot protection feature is available only for merchants on a Shopify Plus plan which our SoleSavy store operates on and has access to.
The cost of Shopify Plus, which includes everything that Shopify has to offer and more, is $2,000 USD per month or a variable fee for higher volume businesses. There is no fee or per use fee to utilize bot protection for merchants on Shopify Plus.
It’s important to note that expansion stores are included at no additional cost to merchants. This means the Shopify Plus fee is not a “per store” fee, it is a per merchant/account fee and one merchant could have multiple stores. A great example is The Whitaker Group which operates Social Status, A Ma Maniére, and APB on Shopify Plus. Other Plus stores you may know in sneakers are KITH, UNDEFEATED, CNCPTS.
The large majority of boutique retailers use some form of Shopify for their online stores.
Once a merchant has Shopify Plus they can request access to Bot Protection and will have it forever on their account. Multiple stores on one account would have access to bot protection. With access you can schedule it fairly instantly and with little notice aka for restocks.
There is some ground rules for how Bot Protection operates:
- Only one bot protection event can be scheduled at a time.
- Maximum duration is 60 min
- Bot protection feature is only available for Online sales channel (www) and isn’t supported for other channels aka IG shopping
Bot Protection is designed to stop bots from automating purchases for hype products. The 60 min duration is in place to ensure it’s not active for too long.
Why? No hype product needs that long to sell out and leaving it on for extended periods of time will hurt regular sales. Shopify intends for Bot Protection to be a special single time use on an as needed basis by stores to help with flash sales aka hype drops.
Checkpoint, captcha, questions etc is a bad experience and bad business for the avg product and consumer which is why the limits exist.
Now let’s get into how this works in sneakers…
SoleSavy focuses on stores and releases that have bot protection running to ensure the playing field is as level as possible for human transactions. The top tier boutiques we all shop at use bot protection for key releases.
We have also seen atomic level releases go above and beyond with alternate stores to ensure the process is as fair as possible. This blueprint started with UNION years ago and is now executed industry wide, most recently with SocialStatus, CNCPTS and Patta.
This is where the Shopify plus structure is important. For any of these merchants to create an alternate store for a release (or a decoy store) it costs them $0 outside of man hours required for basic set up and theme install.
Some stores like CNCPTS will go all in on design and development for their alternate site launch: http://purplehaze96.com and some will do the minimum like Social Status which used the Dawn default theme that is free and visually easy to navigate: https://themes.shopify.com/themes/dawn/styles/default
The challenge currently in the sneaker industry is the lack of stores that have it.
The actual cost to stop a bot for 60 minutes is not high when you consider the integration of Bot Protection into the general Shopify Plus ecosystem.
But that cost ($24,000 per year) is prohibitive to smaller boutiques we love to shop at because their sales volume is low.
If you are a store that gets 24-36 pairs of a hype release, it’s very hard to justify going from a $29 or $79 plan all the way up to $2,000. As much as you want to stop bots, your business doesn’t generate enough revenue to justify a large plan with all the best features.
For large atomic releases, the costs associated with a sneaker release start to finish can add up quickly. Most stores that do these collabs go from selling 200-300 pairs one day to selling 10,000 thousand in one day + scaling the team up thats required to do that is substantial
The “cost” to stop bots is not a one time fee and is also a part of the larger sneaker release cycle from marketing to fulfillment. Stores do hundreds of drops a year to justify that cost and volume of a Shopify Plus plan that also includes features that combat botting.