Case Study: Leading Home Improvement Store achieves reliable site performance, blocks competitors and fraudsters, and reduces bot‑management overhead with Distil Networks

Leading Home Improvement Store - Customer Case Study

A leading home improvement retailer with 800,000 products, hundreds of vendors and dozens of niche sites was being hammered by automated traffic: rogue bots caused outages and infrastructure strain, scraped pricing and content, inflated cart activity, and skewed conversion and A/B testing data. Their manual F5 iRules and scripting approach became a time-consuming “whack‑a‑mole” that couldn’t keep up with sophisticated, distributed bot attacks.

The company deployed a Distil Appliance to automate detection and mitigation. Distil identified that roughly 30% of traffic was bot-driven and is now blocking over 80% of that traffic, preventing at least three outages, freeing about 25% of F5 LTM capacity, and saving two to three man‑days per month. The appliance also improved reporting and whitelisting, stopped price scraping and ad fraud, and produced cleaner analytics for better A/B testing and business decisions.