EshopTrackerBot

EshopTrackerBot is the crawler operated by eshoptracker. It opens public product and checkout pages on online shops and records which delivery carriers and payment methods are offered, in what order, and at what price.

Who is behind it

eshoptracker measures what checkouts look like across the market. Carriers, payment providers and shops use those measurements to see where they stand against everyone else. The crawler is how shops that are not our customers get into that picture.

What it does on your site

  • It reads only pages any visitor can open.
  • It never places an order, never creates an account and never enters payment details.
  • It fills in nothing beyond the address fields a checkout needs before it will show delivery options.
  • Whatever it puts in a basket, it takes back out.
  • It stores no personal data. Carrier names, payment method names, prices, availability and position on the page are the whole of it.
  • It visits a shop once a week at most, and keeps one connection open at a time.

How to recognise it

Every request carries this user agent:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/141.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 (compatible; eshoptrackerbot/1.1; +https://eshoptracker.com/bot)

We do not disguise the crawler as a browser and we do not rotate identities. If a request does not carry that string, it is not us.

Why you may want to let it through

  • Your shop is part of the market whether or not you are our customer. The crawler reads exactly what your own customers see at checkout.
  • Carriers and payment providers use our reports to check where they are offered and at what price. A shop we cannot read is a shop missing from those numbers.
  • We never publish your numbers under your name. They go into aggregates, and an aggregate is only published once the group behind it is large enough.
  • We work for carriers and payment providers, and many shops have agreements with them about how their services are shown. Blocking the crawler does not undo those agreements. It only takes your shop out of the numbers your partners are reading.

If you would rather keep it out

That is your call and there is nothing to argue about. Pick the level you need.

Keep it out of part of your shop

Name those paths in robots.txt. The crawler reads the file before it fetches anything and honours the rules addressed to it.

User-agent: EshopTrackerBot
Disallow: /checkout
Disallow: /cart

Keep it off the whole domain

One rule does it.

User-agent: EshopTrackerBot
Disallow: /

Keep everyone out, visitors included

robots.txt cannot do that. It is an instruction to well behaved crawlers, not a lock. Put those pages behind a login or a password.

Remove the domain for good

A robots.txt rule takes effect on the next visit. If you want the domain gone from our discovery permanently, write to support@eshoptracker.com with the domain. We record it, stop anything already running, and no later pass brings it back.

One thing worth checking first: if you have contracts with carriers or payment providers, some of them expect your public offer to stay readable by the monitoring they commission. Blocking us can put you on the wrong side of that. Your contracts, your call. We simply do what the file says.

Contact

Questions, complaints, or anything the crawler did that it should not have: write to support@eshoptracker.com.

support@eshoptracker.com