The Shop Protector app available on the Shopify app store is now protecting thousands of Shopify merchants from unwanted form spam while also protecting from fake account creation. With the Shop Protector solution, Shopify merchants can improve the user experience for human visitors and increase their conversion rate while taking action to prevent form spam. Additionally, Shop Protector includes a full analytics dashboard which shows site owners the level of human and suspicious traffic on their site.

Unwanted site traffic from bots is a constant source of threat and irritation for Shopify merchants. Beyond the annoyance of form spambots, competitors and other parties can use these automated programs to gather data from websites which is extremely irritating to shoppers and annoying to merchant staff that must be in a never ending battle to cleanse store forms from these spam entries which include newsletter signups, product reviews, comments, etc. Many merchants today combat this problem by forcing users to solve various Turing Tests, such as puzzles or tests where users are required to type in difficult-to-read characters–the most common method is the use of CAPTCHA—in order to prove they are human.

While partially effective, CAPTCHA-type solutions are extremely intrusive, frustrating to customers, driving lower user satisfaction and frequently becoming a barrier to completing online sales–at a real and significant cost to Shopify merchants. Shop Protector solves this problem with proprietary algorithmic models that invisibly monitors and measures user behavior patterns in the background to determine in real-time whether the behavioral characteristics of each site visitor matches historical human patterns, while specifically creating barriers for bots to post entries on any store form.

The Shop Protector solution is completely transparent and frictionless to the human store visitors. Shop Protector identifies the non-human behavior within milliseconds and goes into action to protect all store forms.  Moreover, using proprietary techniques, Shop Protector identifies non-browser spambots that are making automated HTTP requests to a form’s action and stops spam submissions from going through, allowing human customers to have an unencumbered user experience.

In short, the Shop Protector solution enables website owners to improve the user experience for legitimate human users while identifying and defending against spam bots and other malicious traffic.

The Shop Protecor technology is based on a set of proprietary algorithms, human behavior analysis, advanced risk detection and machine learning techniques. The machine learning tools allow the model to evolve and improve over time, providing highly sensitive discrimination.

The Shop Protector form protection technology was developed to solve the problems personally witnessed working with Shopify merchants that were using traditional techniques to detect bot traffic. The Shop Protector approach is unique in that it focuses on modeling human behaviors, rather than just spotting bot markers to clearly identify a human presence on the site. With the Shop Protector solution, Shopify merchants can greatly improve the user experience for human on-line shoppers by invisibly detecting spam bots and other malicious bots while eliminating the need to subject human site visitors to validation testing of any kind, which dramatically increases conversions. Shopify merchants have seen increases as high as 300% after removing CAPTCHA from their checkout using Shop Protector Plus as their sole deterrent.

Shop Protector and Shop Protector Plus can be found on the Shopify app store at https://apps.shopify.com/ellipsis-human-presence-technology