Ghost Shopper

[Guest]

I have someone or something that has been at my site for almost 8 hours now and it has been adding items to its shopping cart all day. It has $2800.00 worth of stuff in its cart right now. Its IP address keeps changing and then the old IP address shows up as another customer. What is this and how do I get rid of it? I am sure it is not a customer.

[Guest]

I have a funny feeling its a scammer testing fake credit cards out.

Not sure exactly how it works but they can use your shopping cart to test if the credit card numbers they generated from a legit (Stolen) card. The shopping cart sends a reply if the card number is no good and they get a different reply if the card number is good. But they use a fake address each time and might set up a few accounts on your site. They can test hundreds of cc numbers in a day. There is a way changing the settings so that you only get a 3 or 4 tries of a certain card then that card (and it's number sequence) are blocked.

 

I was reading someting about it earlier because i got a fake Bank Draft myself so was doing some catching up on fraud and scams.

 

You will have to ask the experts in this forum about changing the settings so you can lower the amount of attempts somebody has of trying a credit card number sequence.

 

Then again, it could just be some body who just loves your site so much they don't want to leave.

 

Anyway, I would say to be safe, to into your admin and delete his account. If he orders with a fake card you are the one going to loose.

[Guest]

This thing has not set up an account. I am watching it in "Whos online" and it just keeps adding stuff to its cart but never checks out. Never creates a login. Just keeps adding stuff into the cart. It is up to $3322.00 in product now. Somethings it even went back and added to its cart again so it has mutiples of the same item. :'(

[Guest]

Its got to be someone whos up to no good.

 

If you are really concerned about it there is another way of stopping him.

 

Go to the Admin of your site, go to tools, go to File Manager. Open the catalog folder, find the index.php file and make a backup of it. When you are sure it is backed up delete the original one. Now who ever is at your site will b stopped pretty quick.

 

Dont forget to upload the backup of your index.php file so you can have your shop beck to normal again.

 

I'm sure that whoever is messing about your site is up to no good and I would suggest stopping him/her.

 

Other than that all I can think of is that you have registered your site with some group for some reason and they are doing an evaluation before they approve it for what ever it's signed up for.

 

What type of shop is it?

[maxxxie]

It's probably just a search engine/spider.

 

Go into your store's admin section and ensure you have "Prevent spider sessions" set to "true" (get to this by going to Configuration, then Sessions). Also, update your spiders.txt file (search the contributions and also the forums for "updated spiders.txt").

 

It's a good practice to do this (aside from the big cart problem) because otherwise search engines like Google will index your site, complete with session IDs, and this is a BAD thing! Make this change early on and you will save yourself some heartache.

 

Cheers,

Max.

[Guest]

What does it mean by "index my site"? What is that?

[Guest]

Thanks Max! :D That got rid of the thing with the giant shopping cart! Now I notice that the spiders that come on now have a name instead of saying "guest" and they no longer say "yes" under session. One of them is at a page called cookie_usage.php.. What is that?

 

Regina

[maxxxie]

Thanks Max! :D That got rid of the thing with the giant shopping cart! Now I notice that the spiders that come on now have a name instead of saying "guest" and they no longer say "yes" under session. One of them is at a page called cookie_usage.php.. What is that?

 

Regina

 

RE your question about indexing - when Google and other search engines visit your site, they "crawl" - ie they visit every possible clickable thing on your site (which is, BTW, why the engine kept adding things to the cart). They add all your site's pages to their index. Hence "indexing". So when people search for things on a search engine, your site's pages appear in the results.

 

The cookie_usage.php page appears when someone browses your page and don't have cookies enabled on their web browser. Commonly, search engines are redirected to this page by contributions such as Ultimate SEOs (and maybe also because they don't have cookies enabled :) ). The good news is that engines aren't getting sessions anymore, and with any luck they didn't put too many session-enabled links in their indexes. You might want to consider using a contribution such as SID Killer, which aims to get search engines to remove session-enabled links from their indexes.

 

Cheers,

Max

[Guest]

I do want my website to show up on search engines. Which if I understand they will because my site is still being indexed.. just no sessions are created. What happens when a session-enabled link is indexed?

 

Regina

[maxxxie]

The outcome of having sessions in an index such as Google is that customers click on it and receive the same session that Google received. OK, fine - until that customer signs up, puts his private details into your DB (name, address etc). Then someone else clicks on that Google link and is assigned the same session. Complete with the other customer's details. It's a topic that's generated a lot of discussion on this forum - you'll see many topics like "customer got someone else's address in their order" or similar.

 

Max

[Guest]

Max thank you so much for taking the time to explain this to me! I am looking for a SID killer now!

 

Regina