Case Study

Shiekh Shoes Protects Hype Sales and Prevents ATO

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Company

Shiekh Shoes sells cutting-edge sneakers and streetwear to an avid base of young customers. Based in Ontario, California, the company has 79 stores around the United States and a multi-million dollar online platform that comprises nearly 20% of the company’s revenue.

“We were impressed with the simplicity of the installation and the dynamic coverage for the latest generation of bot attacks. The product has performed exactly as we expected, accurately screening bots but not impacting real users. We don’t worry about bots on the weekends anymore.”

– CTO, Shiekh Shoes

Challenge

Bot operators bombarded Shiekh Shoes with automated attempts to purchase new sneakers as quickly as possible, which they would then resell for inflated prices on secondary markets. The spike in bot traffic slowed website performance. Users grew frustrated with long page load times and left the site disappointed when bots snagged products before real humans had a chance to buy them.

In addition, botnet operators bombarded the login page with attempts to access customer accounts. This allowed bad actors to place fake orders with stored credit cards, request fraudulent refunds and returns, or sell stolen account information and payment data on the dark web.

Solution

As soon as it became clear that bots were damaging Shiekh’s reputation, forcing customers to seek products from other vendors, and killing performance, the company began to research possible solutions.

Learn More

Shiekh adopted Application Protection to stop scalping bots and prevent ATOs.

  • Easily integrated with their CDN provider, Fastly, without any code or configuration changes on their origin web servers
  • Protects against sophisticated bot attacks using behavior-based, machine learning algorithms
  • Accurately predicts whether a user is a bot before Fastly serves a webpage, potentially saving infrastructure costs

RESULTS

Shiekh implemented Application Protection two days before a major Thanksgiving sale, integrating the solution into their Fastly CDN configuration files in less than one day. Within 24 hours of deployment, Application Protection blocked over 99% of bot visitors.

By reducing bot traffic, Application Protection improved site performance, saved hosting and bandwidth costs, and allowed real human customers an honest chance of purchasing hot products. Shiekh could stop worrying about unplanned outages and instead concentrate on infrastructure improvements and other core initiatives to drive business growth.

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