Stop Denial of Inventory Attacks with Prosopo

What is a Denial of Inventory Attack?

A denial of inventory attack occurs when bots repeatedly add items to online carts or reservations without completing purchases. This locks up inventory and prevents real users from buying.

Why It Matters

Retailers lose revenue and reputation when inventory is artificially limited. Events and exclusive products are especially vulnerable, leading to frustrated customers and lost sales. Bot operators exploit these situations for profit, often reselling items at inflated prices. Sneaker drops, concert tickets, and limited-edition releases are common targets.

How Prosopo Prevents Inventory Denial

Prosopo runs in front of every add-to-cart, reservation and checkout endpoint and decides — per request — whether the visitor is a real buyer, a trusted shopping agent, or hoarding infrastructure:

• Network-wide behavioural modelling. Cursor cadence, scroll patterns and device signals are continuously modelled across our platform. Hoarding bots that pass on one merchant fail on the next.
• Residential proxy and real-device farm detection. Hoarders route through residential IPs and real-device farms to look like ordinary buyers. Prosopo's risk scoring labels those networks even when IP reputation is clean.
• Surge detection on inventory endpoints. Sudden bursts on a high-demand drop — especially from hosting networks or out-of-country ASNs — trigger automatic step-up verification on that traffic without affecting legitimate shoppers.
• Advanced ML adapting in real time. Models retrain continuously, so hoarding tactics that emerge during a drop are countered before the inventory runs out.
• Trusted shopping agents stay welcome. AI agents acting for real customers are recognised and let through; unauthorised hoarding scripts face a CAPTCHA challenge-response or an outright block. Policy is configurable per endpoint via Access Control.

Real buyers and trusted agents complete checkout; hoarding scripts stop dead at the cart.

Recommended products

• API Protection — verify every add-to-cart and checkout request before any inventory is reserved.
• Access Control — block ASNs and fingerprints associated with inventory-hoarding bots during peak events.
• Risk Scoring — score each cart action so your backend can throttle or reject high-risk patterns in real time.

Start protecting your checkout with a quick registration or Speak to a sales representative to discuss your Enterprise requirements.