Commerce of all kinds surges around the end-of-year holidays—but e-commerce has been steadily growing year over year. Retail sites are expected to set a new record for sales this year, reaching $240.8 billion for the Nov 1–Dec 31 period. Cyber Week (between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday, including Black Friday) will account for ~$40.6 billion of that amount, and Cyber Monday alone is expected to net companies $13.2 billion in online sales.

Many e-commerce sites are already offering sales beginning in October, further extending the holiday shopping season and providing more opportunities for record profits. But where there’s money changing hands, there’s an opportunity for fraudsters to get a slice of the pie. Attacks like account fraud, payment fraud, scalping, and denial of inventory are even more common this time of year—and attackers can steal millions of dollars of revenue from your business if left unchallenged.

Our research into the state of bot attack preparedness earlier this year covered e-commerce sites, including “pure players” that don’t have a single physical retail location. This Global Bot Security Report showed us one thing: the e-commerce industry is woefully unprotected against even the most basic of bots.

So how can your business prepare for the holiday shopping season, especially Black Friday and Cyber Monday?

How to Prepare Your Business for Black Friday & Cyber Monday

Basic bot protections aren’t doing the job anymore—a point underlined by our Bot Security Report. E-commerce businesses should implement robust bot and online fraud management solutions that differentiate between human and automated traffic in real time as quickly as possible. We recommend the following steps to fully prepare:

1. Strengthen your security: Robust, AI-powered tools that can detect and block sophisticated bots are a necessity, especially with the surge of attackers around this season. Deploy robust bot and fraud mitigation tools as soon as possible to protect your inventory, pricing, customer accounts, reputation, and revenue.
2. Scale your infrastructure: Both bot traffic and a surge of real human users could cause an unintentional slowdown on your site, or even downtime—both of which could cost you tens of thousands of dollars every minute. Ensure servers can handle traffic spikes caused by both legitimate shoppers and bot surges.
3. Monitor your traffic: Set up 24/7 monitoring to detect anomalies, such as sudden spikes or unusual behavior patterns, that can indicate an influx of bot activity.
4. Secure your APIs: Protect APIs from abuse, as they are a common entry point for bots. In particular, payment APIs are a juicy target for fraudsters looking to steal card details or gather other personally identifiable information from your customers.
5. Test your systems: Conduct stress tests to simulate bot attacks and ensure defenses hold up under pressure. You don’t want to find out too late that the tool you’re implementing slows down your website, blocks legitimate users, or causes other unknown issues under stress.

Preparing your business to stop malicious traffic safeguards revenue, customer trust, and overall site performance during peak shopping periods—and the rest of the year too.

How DataDome Prepares to Protect You During Black Friday & Cyber Monday

While DataDome’s powerful Cyberfraud Protection Platform is always at the ready to block sophisticated bot and fraud threats in real time, making decisions in under 2 milliseconds, we work extra hard to protect our customers during this season.

To prepare for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, every year, DataDome:

• Communicates internally to stress the importance of this sale period for our customers’ businesses, to ensure we are ready to act fast if any issues arise.
• Freezes code deliveries from Nov 25 through Dec 2.
• Ensures we are available on-call in case anything happens that requires a rapid response.

These preparations are very similar to the process we follow for our customers’ flash sales and special events. However, we apply the updates worldwide—making sure every customer has the same level of additional preparation from us. Black Friday and Cyber Monday have never caused a problem our solution isn’t ready to handle.

Over the past years, we have learned:

• The traffic increase is not an issue for us, as it’s absorbed by the total traffic we have on all customers. We also focus heavily on maintaining both low latency and high availability of our solution.
• We avoid delivering maintenance or new features during this period, even if we are very confident with our delivery process. This helps reassure our customers and avoids creating stress for their businesses.

Don’t Let Bots Cost You This Season

The holiday shopping season brings a host of shoppers to e-commerce websites, ready to grab gifts for themselves and others. However, it also brings a host of malicious actors looking to steal revenue, customer information, card details, and more. E-commerce businesses should ensure their site is protected against both basic and sophisticated threats, preferably by implementing a robust bot and fraud detection tool.

Explore how the Cyberfraud Protection Platform can protect your business during Black Friday and Cyber Monday by booking a demo today.