The Best Way To Stop Spam On Your Shopify Store: The Honeypot Trap!
A clever alternative to the classic Google Captcha that doesn’t degrade your customer's experience.
A lot of Shopify store owners have problems with spam.
The most common types of spam on Shopify are:
- Contact form submissions
- Customer account registrations
- Fake emails signing up to your newsletter.
They’re all incredibly annoying, and in some cases even expensive. I have a client who uses Klaviyo, where the pricing is per-subscriber. Obviously, having hundreds of fake subscribers is not doing her any favours.
The usual solution is to implement a Captcha. This is the form which asks you to read some garbled text, or to identify traffic lights and cars.
Personally I hate this.
For some reason, I find it quite difficult to discern the letters. Maybe I’m actually a robot and don’t know it? Or maybe lots of other people hate this too.
Either way it slows down the sign-up process and could even be a blocker for some.
There is a better way to prevent spam and it’s called the ‘Honeypot Trap’.
The idea is quite simple. You add an invisible field in the form code. Humans can’t see it, but bots can.
Bots will fill it out since they fill out every field in a form. Humans will leave it blank because they can’t see it.
Based on this we can simply disable the Submit button if the invisible field is filled. Now your customers can sign up quickly and without any barriers.
Here’s the catch.
Firstly, you’ll need a developer to implement this. It should be a pretty quick job though, and you won’t need to pay all that much.
More importantly, there is no solution that is 100% guaranteed to stop spam. There are different types of bots out there and they have different ways of submitting forms, and neither the honeypot trap nor Captcha or reCaptcha are able to catch all spambots.
This is why so many people are still struggling with spam. You have to find out which type of bot is spamming you and use the appropriate technique to stop them.
A web developer can help you experiment with a variety of techniques using trial and error, and the one I would start with is the honeypot trap. It is without a doubt the most user-friendly anti-spam solution.
About the author:
I’m a freelance Web Designer & Developer specializing in Shopify websites.
You can email me on hi@ed.codes, or follow me on Twitter.
This article was originally posted on the Alioned Agency Blog.
