One Shopify store we work with had more than 65% of its traffic coming from bots, and it's a growing problem that skews analytics, burns through app credits, and can even lead to a cloned copy of your store. Leighton Taylor and Dave Tanguay break down how they fight Shopify bot traffic with Cloudflare O2O, AI-written security rules, and ongoing monitoring for clone sites.

Links Mentioned

• Blockify Fraud Filter & Blocker (Shopify app): https://apps.shopify.com/blockify
• Boxify (shipping rate calculator for Shopify): https://apps.shopify.com/boxify
• Cloudflare: https://www.cloudflare.com/
• Cloudflare O2O for Shopify (setup guide): https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-for-platforms/cloudflare-for-saas/saas-customers/provider-guides/shopify/
• Recon Brand & Clone Protection: https://recon.bot/

Watch This Episode on YouTube

• https://youtu.be/LOlLfAohPUM

Chapters

• 0:00 Intro
• 0:34 Meet Dave Tanguay
• 1:40 Bots From Singapore and China
• 2:26 What Bot Traffic Costs You
• 4:13 Cloned Stores and Missing Orders
• 5:01 Why Blocking Countries Stopped Working
• 5:46 Switching to Cloudflare's Free Plan
• 6:58 What Cloudflare O2O Is
• 8:25 Blockify vs. Cloudflare in Plain English
• 10:30 Challenging Every Checkout
• 11:30 An Arms Race With Bots
• 12:55 Letting Good Bots Through
• 14:09 Moving Your DNS to Cloudflare
• 16:00 Why Not to DIY Your DNS
• 17:37 Doesn't Shopify Already Use Cloudflare?
• 19:07 Using AI to Write the Rules
• 22:47 How We Spotted a Clone Site
• 25:15 Tools That Watch for Clones
• 27:52 Signs You Have a Bot Problem
• 28:17 Wrapping Up

Book a Call

• Book a Call with Patrick: https://calendly.com/patrickriceco/strategy-call
• Book a Call with Leighton: https://cal.com/leightontaylor/discovery-call?utm_source=podcast

Work with Us

• Work with Patrick (SEO and Google Ads): https://patrickriceco.com/
• Work with Leighton (Shopify Store Builds, Migrations, & Ongoing Support): https://envision.io

You may notice that our content sometimes includes affiliate links or sponsored content. We may receive compensation for this type of content, which supports the work we do at no cost to you.

Some Shopify food, beverage, and CPG brands are making $20,000 to $30,000 a month from their recipe pages alone. Patrick Bollenbach, founder of Recipe Kit, joins Leighton and Patrick Rice to break down recipe SEO on Shopify and how his new app Recon catches the scammers cloning Shopify stores.

Links Mentioned

• Recipe Kit: https://recipekit.com/
• Recon Brand & Clone Protection: https://recon.bot/
• Judge.me: https://judge.me/
• Shopify's copyright infringement reporting form: https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/compliance/intellectual-property/copyright-policy

Watch This Episode on YouTube

• https://youtu.be/PLACtwQSaOY

Chapters

• 0:00 Intro
• 0:39 How Patrick Got Into Shopify
• 2:36 His First App Got Declined
• 3:45 What Recipe Kit Does
• 5:09 Getting Out of Service Work
• 8:13 Who Actually Uses Recipes
• 9:40 A Look at the Recipe SERP
• 10:36 Structured Data and Star Ratings
• 13:53 Where AI Fits In
• 17:36 Skip the Grandma Story
• 20:12 The Ad Problem on Recipe Blogs
• 23:32 Bare Recipe Cards Ranking First
• 24:09 Tracking Revenue From Recipes
• 26:05 Images Are the Big Mistake
• 29:25 Pinterest Is Underrated
• 32:33 Better Blog Comments and UGC
• 35:15 Recon and Store Cloning
• 37:02 How to Stop a Clone
• 41:08 Filing a DMCA Takedown
• 45:58 AI Slop Clones in the App Store
• 48:48 Product Is No Longer the Moat
• 52:06 Why Human Teams Still Win
• 52:54 Wrapping Up

Book a Call

• Book a Call with Patrick Rice: https://calendly.com/patrickriceco/strategy-call
• Book a Call with Leighton Taylor: https://cal.com/leightontaylor/discovery-call?utm_source=podcast

Work with Us

• Work with Patrick (SEO and Google Ads): https://patrickriceco.com/
• Work with Leighton (Shopify Store Builds, Migrations, & Ongoing Support): https://envision.io

You may notice that our content sometimes includes affiliate links or sponsored content. We may receive compensation for this type of content, which supports the work we do at no cost to you.

What is a good Shopify conversion rate? It depends on your traffic mix, your industry, and your price point far more than on any benchmark you will find online. In this episode we break down the three step funnel from add to cart, to reaching checkout, to a completed purchase, plus the drop off numbers that show you where a store is actually losing sales.

Links Mentioned

• Baymard Institute (free ecommerce UX articles and research): https://baymard.com
• Blockify (block bot traffic by country or IP): https://apps.shopify.com/blockify
• Cloudflare: https://www.cloudflare.com
• Leighton's Shopify CRO audit checklist: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZV21GWwNNMWmnsU__hlw9Y-QVMNFY02qjrIjeeofGY8/edit?usp=sharing

Watch This Episode on YouTube

• https://youtu.be/X1Ea1du9vbo

Chapters

• 0:00 Intro
• 0:20 The Ecommerce Growth Equation
• 3:06 How Conversion Rate and AOV Compound
• 4:45 Why Conversion Rate Is a Weird Number
• 6:34 Conversion Rate Is Always Relative
• 8:12 How Bots Skew Your Data
• 10:04 Blocking Bot Traffic
• 11:39 Cloudflare and Shopify
• 14:20 Do Bots Actually Hurt Sales?
• 15:19 The Hidden Cost of Bot Traffic
• 17:57 Themes, Navigation, and Basics
• 18:44 Baymard as a CRO Resource
• 20:24 The 100 Point Audit Checklist
• 23:11 Mobile Menus and Shop All Links
• 27:36 Free Shipping Bars and AOV
• 28:51 The Three Step Funnel Benchmark
• 31:01 Diagnosing Where Sales Leak
• 32:14 Improving Add to Cart Rate
• 33:31 When to A/B Test
• 35:40 How Much Data You Need
• 39:06 Wrapping Up

Book a Call

• Book a Call with Patrick: https://calendly.com/patrickriceco/strategy-call
• Book a Call with Leighton: https://cal.com/leightontaylor/discovery-call?utm_source=podcast

Work with Us

• Work with Patrick (SEO and Google Ads): https://patrickriceco.com/
• Work with Leighton (Shopify Store Builds, Migrations, & Ongoing Support): https://envision.io

You may notice that our content sometimes includes affiliate links or sponsored content. We may receive compensation for this type of content, which supports the work we do at no cost to you.