In 2022, one of my favorite clients had their entire online candy store copied. Not a few images or a product description. The whole thing. A pixel-for-pixel clone that pulled live updates from their real site.
The fake store was running ads on Facebook, sending unsuspecting customers to what looked like a legitimate checkout. But it wasn't. It was designed to steal their credit card information.
Thankfully, we caught it early by keeping a close eye on site analytics. But I was angry. What kind of person spends their valuable time on this earth to target candy store customers?
I quickly built a fix for that client. A way to detect the clone and redirect scammed visitors back to the real store. But the more I dug into the problem, the more I realized how widespread it was. Thousands of Shopify stores were being copied every day, and most merchants had no idea it was happening until the damage was done.
So I started building something bigger. I designed and developed the first version of StoreLock and launched it in the Shopify App Store in July 2023.
Since then, we've helped merchants stop hundreds of fraudulent copies of their stores. Every case is a real story. A business owner blindsided by a clone they never knew existed, or a customer who thought they were buying from a brand they trusted.
It hits close to home, too. My own mother found out the hard way that she wasn't actually buying boots from L.L.Bean at lllbean.com.
Knowing that people like her, and like my favorite candy store client, are being targeted by these scams is what keeps me focused. I built StoreLock to give merchants the tools to detect copies of their stores, protect their customers, and shut down fraud before it spreads.
That's what we do. And we're not done.
