K&L Wine Merchants Restores Website Performance & Fair Purchasing With DataDome

The Problem: Bot Users Cause Outages & Get an Unfair Advantage

K&L Wine Merchants’ specialty is rare wines and liquors. Many of the products they sell come in extremely limited quantities, and therefore attract a lot of interest from collectors. 

“We’ve been selling wine online since the mid-1990s,” says Brian Zucker, Owner of K&L Wine Merchants. “Several years back, certain customers started building bots to try and find these really rare bottles on our website before anyone else. Over time, this developed into an enormous source of traffic and ultimately some technology infrastructure challenges.”

Indeed, the most aggressive bots could reload web pages millions of times per day to be first to find out if a product came back in stock, affecting the website’s performance to the point of causing outages. As a result, K&L Wine Merchants’ development team was spending a lot of time—sometimes hundreds of hours a month—dealing with automated traffic, instead of building better e-commerce features.

Another problematic aspect of the situation was that bot users were gaining an unfair advantage over other buyers in the competition for the most coveted bottles.

“We have many great customers, and not all of them are writing bots. We wanted to be more equitable in how those really rare, hard-to-find products were sold,” Brian comments.

The Solution: Real-Time Bot Detection, Ultra-Easy Integration

At one point, it had become abundantly clear that the performance issues and outages were caused by bot traffic. Since one of K&L Wine Merchants’ existing technology providers offered bot detection as an add-on service, Brian and his team decided to give it a try. 

Unfortunately, the tool turned out not to be very effective: bots were still getting through, and it made very little difference to their performance problems. 

That conclusion kicked off a search for a specialized bot mitigation solution. The team wanted a technology partner with solid references from other retail e-commerce businesses experiencing similar problems, and they wanted the solution to be easy to deploy.

DataDome fit the criteria perfectly, and on the first sales call, the two teams hit it off.

“The technology seemed strong, but even more importantly, everyone we interacted with clearly knew what they were talking about and were very familiar with exactly the pain points that we were going through. We were quite impressed,” says Brian. “They were also great communicators, which made it easy to go on to the next call and then ultimately implement the solution.”

Thanks to DataDome’s Cloudflare server-side module, the actual integration was ultra-easy, taking just minutes.

The Results: Focus on Business, Not Bots

Website performance, outages, and unfair competition for the rarest wines are no longer concerns for K&L Wine Merchants.

“We get to focus on wine retail again. And we’re a lot better at wine retail than at bot mitigation,” Brian smiles. “These days, we spend very little time on bot-related topics. Really, for the most part, DataDome is set it and forget it. We do get a daily email summary, and if we decide to take a closer look at something, the interface is very well designed, comprehensive and intuitive.”

While website performance was K&L Wine Merchants’ primary pain point, the detailed bot detection data from DataDome also revealed other fraudulent activities on the site, including vulnerability scanning, payment fraud, and credential stuffing. Those are now nipped in the bud as well.

“We work with a lot of software vendors. It’s really rare and unique that something is as easy to integrate as DataDome was, and then works exactly as advertised. It really is a fantastic tool, a total game changer,” Brian compliments.

“Unfortunately, there’s just no getting around the fact that many of our products are so rare and limited that there will never be enough to go around. But at least our site isn’t going down in the process of working through the requests,” he concludes.