[SOLVED] How can people create an empty cart without add to cart button

-- url of the page with the problem -- : www.dfcgrootverbruik.nl/shop
-- HikaShop version -- : 3.1.1
-- Joomla version -- : 3.7.2
-- PHP version -- : 7.0.20

Hi,
In our shop only people with an account can see prices, they are using an ACL on the price. Others would normally see a free price but we changed that to an icon and a link to another webshop.
In the shop we have hidden the add to cart button by hiding the add to cart button for free products.

For some strange reason there is somebody/something that is creating a lot of empty carts with no registration.
It looks like this :

Anyone know how to stop this from happening?
Looks like a bot but is very annoying because we monitor the carts for our customers and all the empty carts are really irritating.

Thanks for any tips.

Hi,

It's probably the search engines crawling your pages and finding the add to cart links, trying them, etc.
We've actually added a patch 2 days ago so that crawlers ignore the add to cart links which should reduce that behavior.
You can also modify the robots.txt file of your website to forbid the add to cart URLs for the crawlers and that should be even better.

Hi,
I've updated to the last version but still they find a way to add "nothing" to the cart and leave.

It would be nice if the IP address is added to the list of carts, then it's easier to try and find these jokers and stop this useless behaviour.
Any tips on that ?

I'm working on the robot.txt file but it's a bit hard when you don't know who to block :blink: So it's going through logfiles etc. to see if I can find anything.

Thanks for any tips/suggestions.

Hi,

The IP address is not stored with carts so I don't see any easy solution to get the IP address.
But anyway, in the robots.txt you don't need the IP address.
You need to add the URL folders that you want to block.
For example:

Hi, just a quick update for anyone having the same issue :

This is what I still see in the access logs:
msnbot-207-46-13-61.search.msn.com - - [12/Jul/2017:14:17:35 +0200] "GET /shop/product/updatecart/add-1/cid-10194 HTTP/1.1" 303 20 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)"

Even while having the suggested line in the robots.txt file.

I think that stronger measures are needed

Maybe somebody another tip on this?

Hi,

Bingbot is supposed to honor the robots.txt rules:
blogs.bing.com/webmaster/2012/05/03/to-c...is-bingbots-question
So I don't see why you would still get these.
There must be problems in your robots.txt
tools.seochat.com/tools/robots-txt-valid...sthash.l0xJQoAC.dpbs

However, I also found some pages saying that bing ignores the robots.txt:
stackoverflow.com/questions/15796035/bin...afficbasedsspsitemap
So you might want to follow the recommendations there.

Hi Nicolas,

I've tried all the polite ways to tell bingbot not to put anything in the shopping cart but nothing helped.
So I had to block it through .htaccess and that worked.

Thanks for all the tips, I will mark this as solved.