Shopping Bot Guide: What Is It and How to Create an Automated One

With LLM tools like ChatGPT, it is now possible to build more personalized shopping bots that are almost as accurate and reliable as humans. In today’s guide, we will discuss everything you need to know about shopping bots, including what they actually are and how to build one. Let’s dive in immediately. 

Key Takeaways

• Bots automate product search, price checks, stock monitoring, and even checkout, saving users a lot of time.
• Modern shopping bots use technologies like web scraping, APIs, automation tools, AI, databases, and proxies to work efficiently.
• There are different types of e-commerce bots, including retail assistants, price-comparison bots, deal finders, and limited-edition bots.
• Bots offer clear benefits for users and businesses, such as faster purchases, better deals, improved customer experience, and higher conversions.
• While powerful, shopping bots come with risks like site blocking, legal restrictions, errors, and limited access, making testing, proxies, and careful setup important.

What Is a Shopping Bot?

A shopping bot is an automated software tool that helps users shop products on online stores without having to do everything manually. A bot interacts with websites or apps to find products, compare options, and sometimes complete orders on behalf of the online shoppers. 

The user can design their bot and choose what exact tasks they would like it to do and handle the rest by yourself. Shopping bots have also gotten better in recent years, thanks to the advancements made in generative AI. 

So, how does a shopping bot work? 

Bots follow these simple steps:

• The bot follows set rules or scripts to browse online stores. The script includes all the tasks one wants the bot to handle.
• It then collects data such as prices, product details, availability, and reviews.
• Reacts to triggers, such as a price drop or an item coming back in stock.
• Finally, some bots can add items to a cart and check out automatically.

Some of the common tasks that bots are designed to handle include product search, price comparison, stock monitoring, order placement, and customer support.

How Shopping Bots Work (In Detail)

These bots work by following programmed logic that tells them what to look for, where to look, and the kinds of actions to take. This level of personalizing enables users to create bots for specialized shopping tasks. They combine automation, data collection, and decision-making to handle shopping tasks with minimal human input.

Key Technologies Behind Shopping Bots

• Web scraping: Enables the bot to collect product data such as prices, availability, and descriptions from websites.
• APIs: Bots use APIs to access structured data directly from supported e-commerce platforms.
• Automation frameworks: Simulate human actions like clicking, scrolling, and form filling.
• AI and machine learning: Some bots use machine learning to understanding user intent, recommendations, and chat-based shopping.
• Databases: Store product data, price history, and user preferences.
• Proxies and IP rotation: To avoid IP bans and access region-specific content, bots use proxies.

Typical Workflow of an Automated Shopping Bot

These are the typical steps online shopping steps follow to do their job: 

• Set rules or preferences: The user script includes what to buy, price limits, stores, or locations.
• Scan online stores: Bot uses these rules to visit the websites or use APIs to search for the relevant products.
• Collect and analyze data: It checks prices, stock status, shipping options, and other details.
• Make decisions: The bot then compares results against the defined rules.
• Take action: Based on the above comparison, the bot can then take actions such as sending alerts, adding items to a cart, or completing a purchase.
• Monitor and repeat: Some bots run continuously to track changes over time.

Benefits of Using Shopping Bots

Faster automated purchasing and Checkout

By using bots, users can quickly purchase products without going through several manual steps. Bots can instantly find products, compare them against pre-defined rules, and add them to cart without user intervention. This significantly improves the shopping experiences for users. 

Real-Time Inventory & Price Tracking

E-commerce bots monitor products continuously to check for metrics like prices and inventory product availability (inventory levels). This allows the shopper to always be updated if a good deal lands on their favorite shopping website. 

Improved User Experiences & Support

E-commerce bots can act as always-on assistants. They are also integrated in some websites and can answer common product and order questions, guide users to the right products, provide quick responses without, and offer personalized recommendations. Bots can also be customized to offer more personalized product shopping experiences. Automating several tasks using bots allows businesses to save on customer support costs. 

Higher Conversion Rates for Brands

For businesses, bots can directly increase sales since they act as virtual assistants to handle most of the basic queries. Businesses automate most of the basic support and sales tasks using retail chatbots, especially in the early shopping journeys. Since bots reduce friction when shopping, customers are more likely to buy more products, which ultimately boosts sales for brands.

Types of Shopping Bots

Some popular categories of shopping bots include: 

Common Retail Bots

These are general-purpose shopping bots that help users browse online stores faster. They are commonly used to recommend products based on preferences, answer questions about products, shipping, or returns. These bots are often integrated into e-commerce websites as chat assistants, which makes interacting with these sites faster for users.

Price-Comparison Bots

Price-comparison bots help users find the best price for a product. They do this by scanning multiple online stores at the same time and compare prices, shipping costs, and seller ratings. Their goal is to show the users where to buy at the lowest total cost, which makes them useful for big purchases or frequent buyers.

Coupon & Deal-Finding Bots

These e-commerce chatbots focus on saving shoppers money by searching for active coupons and promo codes. They can even automatically apply these discounts at checkout. Some are designed to simply alert users about sales, flash deals, or special offers, which makes their shopping experience more seamless. 

Sneaker & Limited-Edition Bots

These are built to help shoppers buy limited edition sneakers faster by beating their competition. They are designed to offer the fastest speeds when purchasing limited-edition items like sneakers, tickets, or collectibles. For instance, sneaker bots can complete purchases in seconds, beating other humans trying to buy the same product. 

Popular Shopping Bots on the Market

If you don’t want to build a bot from scratch, there are several off the shelf bots that you can use for various shopping tasks. Some of the popular ones include: 

SnapTravel

As you might expect, SnapTravel helps users find hotel deals through chat. This bot can be integrated via messaging apps like WhatsApp and Telegram. It helps travelers in finding products and services with discounted prices before traveling. This includes discounted hotel prices that may not always be visible on booking sites. It can also handle search, booking, and support through chat. 

Birdie

Birdie is a conversational shopping assistant for online stores. It uses chat-based interactions on websites to help shoppers find the right products. Birdie mainly focuses on personalization and automated shopping. 

Operator

It is a popular AI-powered shopping assistant that helps users quickly discover and buy products. It handles product search and recommendations, allowing users to only do the final transactions processing steps. 

Masha.ai

Masha.ai is built mainly for sales processes automation. It engages website visitors via chat and answers product questions instantly. It also helps businesses qualify leads and drive purchases.

ChatShopper

ChatShopper focuses on conversational e-commerce. This conversational AI tool is often integrated into online stores to help users browse and buy products via chat, reducing friction in the buying processes.

SMSBump

SMSBump uses messaging to drive shopping actions such as sending order updates, promotions, and reminders. This bot also recovers abandoned carts via SMS which can boost retention and repeat purchases.

Yellow Messenger

Yellow Messenger is an enterprise-grade chatbot solution that supports shopping, customer service tasks, and marketing use cases. It can be integrated into chat, voice, and messaging apps. Yellow messenger is mainly used by large brands and enterprises to enable automation at scale.

Kick Bot Shop

Kick Bot Shop targets high value limited-edition products such as sneaker releases and drops. It automates fast checkout, allowing shoppers to beat their competition when shopping limited inventory products like sneakers and gaming consoles. This bot also monitors restocks and launches.

The Downsides and Risks of Shopping Bots

Despite having several benefits shopping assistants or bots have several downsides and risks that you need to know about before using them. These include: 

• Limited Availability Issues: They normally buy items faster than humans, which often leads to popular products selling out instantly. This is common with products like Sneakers, gaming consoles, and GPUs. 
• Website Blocking & Anti-Bot Challenges: Many virtual shopping sites actively block bots using techniques like captchas, rate limits, and behavior detection. So, maintaining a working bot can require constant updates, which makes the whole process more complex.
• Legal and Marketplace Restrictions: Some websites clearly ban bot usage in their terms, so using one can lead to account bans or order cancellations. 
• Prone to errors: Shopping bots, especially those given a lot of freedom can sometimes make costly errors such as buying more items than the shopper intended. Such errors can obviously lead to frustration in the customer journeys as they shop for products.
• Data quality and quantity: A bot learns more depending on the amount and accuracy of data it’s fed with. 

How to Create an Automated Shopping Bot

If you don’t want to use the off-the-shelf bots we have shared earlier, you can build a custom one for more personalized experiences. Use the steps below to build more advanced bots with all the custom features you want. 

Step 1: Define the Bot’s Purpose and Platform

You need to start with a clear reason why you need to make a shopping bot. It should include what problem the bot solves, the website or platform it will target, and whether it will be for personal use or a business. Having clear goals makes every later decision easier.

Step 2: Choose the Right Tech Stack or No-Code Tool

Pick tools based on your skills and needs. For those with technical skills and willing to spend time to build a very customized bot, using programming languages like Python or JavaScript can be great options. For the less technical users, using no-code tools is the way to go. Besides the bot creation tool, you may also need to choose automation tools for browser actions, APIs if the store supports them, and more.

Step 3: Set Up Product Search, Filters, and Alerts

The core logic of your bot should:

• Define product names, URLs, or categories. 
• Set filters like price range, size, or color.
• Decide when the bot should trigger an action.
• Add alerts for stock changes or price drops and any other crucial changes in certain metrics. 

Spend as much time as you can on the core logic because accuracy here prevents false alerts or mistakes when making purchases. Also, if you need a bot that offers personalized experiences, ensure to add all the necessary parameters in your logic. 

Step 4: Add Automation Features

Enhance the bot’s usefulness by including as many automation features as you can. Such features can include auto-add items to cart, optional automatic checkout, email, SMS, or app notifications,  price history or availability tracking, and more. 

Step 5: Test, Optimize, and Deploy

Before using the bot fully, you need to first test it on different scenarios to ensure it handles them as intended. You must check how the bot behaves during errors or blocks. Before deploying the bot, you may also need to improve its speed and reliability based on feedback after the initial tests.  Finally, deploy the bot on a schedule or server if needed.

Do You Need Proxies for a Shopping Bot?

Proxies are not necessarily a must when using shopping bots. But as earlier shared, some websites block bots, so using proxies can help bypass such restrictions. Most online stores track IP addresses, so sending too many requests with the same IP can often lead to blocks. Using proxies is necessary to regain connection in case of an IP ban. 

How Proxies Prevent IP Blocking

By using proxies, each bot can be assigned several IP addresses. This allows requests to be spread across multiple IPs instead of one, reducing the risk of rate limits and bans. Without proxies, bots often stop working after a short time due to IP bans. 

Best Proxy Types for Shopping Automation

• Residential proxies: These use IP addresses of real home devices, making them less vulnerable to bans since they’re harder to detect. This makes them ideal for sensitive sites and checkout flows.
• ISP proxies: IP addresses provided by internet service providers. They are often fast and stable, which makes them a good choice if you need a balance between speed and trust.
• Rotating proxies: These change IPs automatically at set intervals or per request. Continuous IP rotation minimizes chances of detection, which makes these proxies ideal for running bots that’re active for longer periods. Rotating proxies are ideal for tasks like price tracking and large-scale monitoring.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I build a shopping bot without coding skills?

Yes, you can. There are several no-code and low-code tools that let you build simple shopping bots using visual workflows. It is important to note that creating bots with complex features like auto-checkout and bypassing protections may require some coding.

What problems may occur when buying online with bots?

Some of the common problems include: 

• Online orders getting canceled.
• Accounts can be banned when bot usage is detected.
• Websites may block IPs or payments.
• Bots can fail when sites change their layout.

Do shopping bots always require proxies?

Shopping bots do not necessarily require proxies to work, but they are needed to improve reliability. If you intend to run bots for longer periods, using proxies is necessary. Proxies also allow users to access content in any location, providing personalized experiences for those who need to access products available in specific regions. 

What is a virtual waiting room and how does it work?

A virtual waiting room is a system used by websites during peak hours when traffic is at its highest. When using virtual rooms, users are placed in a queue before accessing the store. Entry is usually randomized or time-based. Many limited-edition drops use waiting rooms, which can make bots struggle since sessions are tracked.