Bots & Singles Day: NOT a Perfect Match

Black Friday and Cyber Monday may be synonymous with “holiday sales,” but Singles Day – November 11 – is the largest annual shopping event in the world. Originally intended as a counter to Valentine’s Day, Singles Day celebrates – you guessed it! – being single in China.

According to Reuters, last year the total value of goods sold during Singles Day totaled 1.15 trillion yuan ($157.97 billion), which is more than four times the $35.3 billion U.S. shoppers spent last year during Cyber Week (the period from Black Friday to Cyber Monday). 

This year’s in-demand hot ticket items? Items related to health, wellness and outdoor lifestyle, and, unsurprisingly, consumer electronics (Chinese smartphone and consumer electronics company Xiaomi claimed record sales).

Of course, where there’s money (and flash sales!) there’s bots. On a normal business day, DataDome detects and blocks a new bad bot targeting our customers’ websites and mobile apps every millisecond. But during flash sales events, e-commerce platforms typically face at least five times—sometimes up to 30 times– more bot attacks than on normal days. 

As such, our threat research team was on the lookout for suspicious activity across our customers’ sites in the lead up to, and during, Singles Day. Here’s what we observed on one of our customers’ sites:  

This graph shows the number of requests on the website in a 10 min period during Singles Day; the biggest spike is linked to the sale of tickets for an entertainment park.The website faced spikes of > 100k requests/min, including dozens of thousands of bot requests. 

The big (albeit obvious) takeaway? Having a bot management solution in place is your best bet against the havoc bots can wreak on your bottom line, your reputation and user experience. No online business wants to experience performance degradation or attacks during a highly anticipated sales event. 

Indeed, it’s challenging to manage traffic spikes and even more challenging when you have bots targeting your website(s). Having bot protection in place enables businesses to better allocate infrastructure resources to real, human users and ultimately provide a better online experience. 

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are up next; here are four steps businesses can take to prepare.