We run a small automated visitor called clotch-pricebot. If you administer a shop and found this page in your logs, this is what it is and what it does.
What it does
It reads the published price on a small number of product pages, once a day, and records what that price was on that date. We use that record to tell shoppers whether something is genuinely reduced or merely marked as reduced. Nothing else on the page is stored, and no images, descriptions or page content are copied or republished.
How it behaves
- It reads and obeys your robots.txt before every run, and skips any host that disallows it.
- It waits several seconds between requests and visits each page at most once a day.
- It watches a few dozen product pages, not a crawl of your catalogue.
- It identifies itself honestly in the user agent and never pretends to be a browser.
- It runs overnight, when your traffic is lowest.
Asking us to stop
Disallow clotch-pricebot in your robots.txt and it will stop by itself on its next run, without being asked twice. If you would rather tell us directly, write to hello@clotch.shop and we will remove your site the same day. You do not need to give a reason.
If you would prefer to send us your prices rather than have them read, we would much rather have them from you. We are happy to take a product feed or work through your affiliate programme instead.