Hey there,
We spoke with over 27 brands in the last month, all dealing with different email marketing issues.
The wild part? We noticed over 50% of those problems were actually caused by bot attacks. And in every single case, the brand didn’t even know it was happening!
They saw a traffic spike and called it “good news,” only to watch their email metrics crater two weeks later. By the time anyone connects the dots, the damage’s already done.
The gap between a Shopify bot event and the Klaviyo consequence is where brands get blindsided.
Today, 51% of all web traffic is automated, and malicious bots now represent 37% of all internet traffic. Over the recent holiday season, e-commerce stores were hammered with over 415 million bot attacks, and the numbers are only climbing..!
What’s Actually Happening?
The “Started Checkout” Trap:
Bots are hitting Shopify checkout pages and submitting fake “Started Checkout” events. Because of the native Shopify-Klaviyo integration, these events sync to Klaviyo automatically, requiring no opt-in and no form submission.
How to recognize the attack:
Repetitive Patterns: Profiles with the same first and last name (e.g., “bonner bonner”) or placeholders like “Anonymous.”
Single-Action Profiles: Hundreds of profiles starting checkout with the exact same item and doing nothing else.
The “+” Sign: Emails using address manipulation (e.g., name+123@gmail.com).
Zero Intent: No product views, no browsing, and no purchases before the event.
Why This Destroys Your Deliverability
When these bot profiles enter your Abandoned Checkout flows, the damage compounds fast.
The Bounce Spike: Brands are reporting bounce rates above 3.8% and massive amounts of profiles being skipped for “suspicious email.” This tells Google and Yahoo your list hygiene is broken.
The “Real Person” Trap: As Klaviyo’s own documentation notes, not all bot-submitted profiles are fake addresses. Bots often fill out forms with real email addresses belonging to real people. When these people receive an email they never signed up for, they hit “Spam.”
The Threshold: Google enforces a hard spam complaint ceiling of 0.3%. If just 30 people out of 10,000 mark you as spam, your domain reputation tanks. This doesn’t just hit your emails, it kills your transactional receipts too.
What To Do About It
Fighting back requires moving beyond basic defenses. As noted in recent ecommerce survival guides, the threat is evolving, and so must your strategy. [Ref: Codilar survey on Bot Attacks]
Here is how we at RetainIQ handle this for our partners:
Suppression Segments: We build segments to identify bot patterns and use webhooks to auto-suppress them the second they hit the account.
Smart Flow Filters: We add filters to Abandoned Checkout flows to exclude profiles with zero “Viewed Product” events. If they didn’t look at the item, they aren’t human.
Honeypot Implementation: We add hidden custom properties to Klaviyo forms that only bots fill in, making them easy to tag and remove.
Server-Side Tracking: We move tracking off the browser to filter out bot traffic before it ever reaches Klaviyo or your ad platforms.
Uncover the leaks in your account
At RetainIQ, we encounter this daily. Over the course of 500+ audits, we’ve seen how bot attacks stay hidden until a brand’s open rates are already in the gutter. It’s the single biggest silent killer of email revenue right now.
We specialize in identifying these patterns and cleaning up the technical rot that allows bots to stay in your flows. If you want to see if your account is currently under attack and exactly how we can fix it, let’s run a deep dive on your setup.
Check your account for bots at $0
P. S. We handle the entire end-to-end email management + the tech for $990/mo. It’s basically 1/3rd the cost of a single full-time hire but with the full RetainIQ expert team behind it. If you want to stop overpaying for mid results and keep the bots out of your business, let’s chat.
