How to Stop Spammers from Registering on Your Magento 2 Website

Many of us have a variety of tasks we do during our normal day. Using public transport to make our way to work, talking to the friends on the phone, doing the daily shopping and so on. For each of these activities, we need some sort of a personal ID: bank account, telephone number or credit card credentials.

With the recent advancement of IT technology, it only takes a couple of minutes to start using one of the above-mentioned services. By going through a typical registration process in Magento 2, a user may create his or her virtual account in a matter of minutes. This is a simple and quick solution for accomplishing a variety of tasks with just a few clicks of the mouse. But with it comes a downside. Nowadays, many individuals can easily create a spam account and use it for their illegal purposes. As the result of that, people true identify is often scattered across the Web.

For many visitors, registration process plays an important role in their overall user experience. It can either be a slow and tedious process or be a seamless activity limited to just the type of information the company really needs to have. Companies need this data for understanding their customers’ behavior and adjusting their overall business approach accordingly.

The article you are currently reading is going to focus on the 5 tips on how to combat spam registrations on your Magento website. So, read on if your Magento 2 based store is suffering from fake registrations because our short review is likely to provide you with some useful information. But first of all, we are going to spend a few minutes, giving us a detailed definition of the spam registrations as well as describing an extent of the damage it might cause to your business.

What are Spam Registrations?

Spamming is usually defined as an act of supplying irrelevant information done with the help of automated software. The registration process is just one of the areas currently suffering from this problem. In order to bypass a website protection code, most of the bots use tools like ‘curl’ and ‘postman. More advanced bots are capable to do their job without the need of bypassing the code on a website.

Why do companies and consumers suffer from it?

In Magento 2 store, an accurate customer data coming from a user registration may have a big impact on the company’s business success. Having most comprehensive information helps to study their clients’ behavior and is a great source of information for both advertisers and other marketing professionals. Lack of accurate information makes it difficult to attract new advertisers to promote their products or services and to study the behavior of the existing customers.

User information is also an important tool for tailoring products towards the customers’ needs. So, when its quality of the customer data goes down, companies have a much lesser chance of proving the kind of product or service their real customers really need.

So, we are now coming to the main part of this article which are the tools for combating spam registrations on your Magento 2 store. One of them can be a periodic data cleansing process aim for removing that unwanted data your business may be suffering from. But while being stored in your database, that fake information will use a considerable amount of your system’s resources which could alternatively be spent on other more important information for your business. Rather than fighting spam when it already hit the fan, we would propose to take some measures to prevent it from occurring in the first place. Those methods are not guaranteed to stop all the spam you’ve might be dealing with. But they will help you to reduce its amount down to some lower level.

5 methods of reducing spam registrations in Magento 2

a) Verification with CAPTCHA code

A CAPTCHA code is one of the most popular instruments used for fighting spam registrations. The whole point behind its use is an idea of differentiating between a human behavior and the one displayed by a spambot. The most common type of a CAPTCHA code is usually an ordered row of random characters or image selectors. In most cases, they can be understood by the human beings either visually or aurally. However, the majority of the spam bots are likely to face difficulties while trying to create a new account on your site.

Despite its effectiveness, CAPTCHA codes have some obvious disadvantages. Due to the development of the modern technology, many programmers have managed to build some advanced software known as DECAPTCHA which is capable of bypassing a typical CAPTCHA.

In addition to that, CAPTCHAs may have a negative impact on some of the users’ experience leading to frustration and an increase in the website’s abandonment rate.

Therefore, we can make a conclusion that CAPTCHAs are not a perfect recipe for your website’s security. It might be an effective tool for dealing with some brutal bot attacks, but is often non-user-friendly and cannot guarantee to provide your registration with the complete protection it often needs.

Magento 2 allows to enable Captcha, for example, during the registration process. You can find the settings following: STORES -> Configuration -> CUSTOMERS -> Customer Configuration -> CAPTCHA -> Forms.

How to Enable CAPTCHA in Magento 2

(b) Verification via a mobile phone

Another popular instrument for combating fake registrations is verification via mobile phone. Once his number is typed into the respective form field, the user will receive a special verification code on his mobile device which should then be inserted back into the registration form to complete the signup process.

But even this method has its drawbacks. One of them is the need for the user to constantly be in the mobile coverage area. Another is the time it takes for the user to enter a mobile number, wait for a code, and re-enter it back into the system.

(c) Verification with your Social Media Account

Social media accounts are another instrument your visitors may use to ease the overall registration process.

By signing up with their preferred social account, your customers will avoid the need of going through the routine and time-consuming process of typing their personal information into the respective registration fields. Spammers are likely to find it difficult to automate this process because their bots aren’t trained to of creating new accounts on Facebook, Twitter or any other platform and use them for their illegal purposes.

(d) Using the “Honeypot” technique

A honeypot is the name of the small field within a registration field. CSS or JavaScript technologies make this field invisible for an ordinary website visitor. However, this is not the case for the spambots who are likely to fill this field by default, therefore catching the attention of the site’s anti-spamming software.

When you are integrating a honeypot into a registration form, we would suggest you not to change your external response in any way once its field filled in. Display the same type of message your actual users will normally see once the registration process is over. That way, you will avoid sending any signals that the fake registration has actually been flagged as a spam activity.

But just as it is the case of CAPTCHAS, Honey Pots have their own disadvantages. These are the amount of time it takes for the developers to implement an actual Honey Pot in the website’s programming code as well as the need for its constant update to prevent spammers from improving their software to break through the anti-spam wall.

(e) Using Magento 2 extensions for manual account validation

Another possibility of fighting spam registration is an opportunity to validate new customers manually. This option, implemented with the help of the Magento 2 Pending Registration extension, will be especially relevant for small and mid-sized Magento 2 stores who will have the time to manually consider every customer registration and decide on its validity. When this option is implemented, your customers will not be able to use their accounts until the moment you approve their registration.

Backend: How to Edit Status in the Customer Profile in Magento 2

Conclusion

As we’ve discussed in this article, registration forms in Magento 2 often fall the victims of spam attacks which may harm the quality of data in the customer database management systems, therefore, making it difficult for the company to serve their real customers. Despite a variety of anti-spam measures currently at their disposal, business owners should always look for new ways of stopping stop spam registrations as to give a respective answer to the intruders’ constant attempts of supplying their false information on a site.