A short guide on how to beat, fool, and trick Shopify bots and prevent them from checking out on your store.

1) Do not publish products live on the store until drop time. Loading a product live on the site and then quickly un-publishing it has already given away your product to bots and scrapers, which log every product that publishes on your site.

2) Do not add variants to your product until it is ready to go live. Similar to #1, loading variants of your product before release time gives them away to bots.

3) Cycle your API keys and credentials for any private app that you use. API keys allow for access to published and unpublished products. If they leak or are revealed, everyone will have backend access to your products. Cycle these often and before releases (before you draft your release products).

4) Enter password-mode on your storefront well before release time. This will allow any pre-generated checkout sessions to expire and level the playing field once your product releases and goes into a queue.

5) Use different naming strategies for the links of your products. Change this often and before any release. Bots examine the link and title and description of products, and will perform keyword matching against all three of these.

6) Delete any link redirects to your product. These will reveal your product before it even is published.

7) Enable captcha on your checkout before any release. Always. It is absolutely stupid to leave captcha disabled during a release.