The Price Scraping Bot Threat on E-commerce Store Using Custom XPATH Technique

Scraping bots or scrapers are computer programs that automatically fetch data from the Internet. The price of products is illegally copied from different e-commerce stores and pasted into their sites for their benefit. Various web traffic surveys show that automated programs account for approximately half of all website traffic. However, an E-commerce website concerns many security issues that remain unresolved despite a significant increase in E-commerce development. One of the most damaging attacks on E-commerce sites is the price scraping when it comes to competitors. This paper aims to uncover the fact that both humans and bots are involved in stealing the prices of products from different e-commerce stores without the permission of original sites. This paper discusses the well-known price scraping tools and techniques. First, we have performed real-time price scraping attacks through custom XPATH, and we have obtained results which show that some platforms are still vulnerable for bots e.g., Alibaba and eBay. These sites do not restrict the copy of XPATH. Whereas, Amazon and daraz.pk blocks the price code from HTML document for the scraper to copy the custom XPATH. Moreover, we propose solutions to mitigate price scraping attacks on different e-commerce stores.