Customer Success Story: Online Bike Shop

A bike shop from central Europe with an online storefront that also offers a collection of useful content both for professional athletes and amateur cyclists.

"Up until 2020, the online storefront had a small but stable share in the company's revenue. All of a sudden, our online shop has become our main business."

The Problem

The primary cause of customer concern was content theft and duplication. The Bike Shop produces original content for cyclists that is loved by their clients, establishes the bike shop as an expert in their field and helps new clients discover the shop thanks to good SEO.

A number of bad actors, including the Shop’s competitors, chose not to invest into developing their own expertise and brand identity and simply started copying the Bike Shop content, without referencing the source.

The consequences for the Bike Shop?

✗ Reputational losses due to illegal copying and uncontrolled distribution of their content

✗ SEO and search ranking degradation

✗ Poor server performance as the servers are struggling to cope with bad actors’ content scrapers, as well as with the surge of legitimate online business

BotGuard provided the bike shop's team with the tools to monitor and analyze their traffic for free for a 3 month period before committing to any solution, in order to first diagnose the problem precisely and choose the solution best suited for their business.

Armed with the analysis of their actual traffic, the Bike Shop chose the BotGuard eCommerce Protection Suite and started blocking harmful bots such as crawlers, content scrapers, and other unwanted visitors from entering their website.

The BotGuard servers are maintained and updated by BotGuard, while the Bike Shop retains full control over their infrastructure.

The bike shop was able to explore the nature of their traffic and analyze exactly what is going on behind the scenes with no upfront commitment or fees.

Once the BotGuard eCommerce Protection Suite was switched on, the Bike Shop saw the following results:

✓ Significant reduction of the server load by 22%

✓ The website content is no longer stolen or duplicated

✓ Traffic peaks were significantly smoothed down due to bot traffic mitigation