CellarTracker is the world’s largest database of wine and cellar management information, featuring extensive collections of reviews and personal anecdotes from wine enthusiasts.
Industry
Beverage
Use Cases
Anti-Automation and Bot Protection, Device-level Fingerprinting
If your business provides value through information, protecting your data is more critical than ever. The modern internet offers a playground for virtually everyone, providing access to content and connecting enterprises and consumers globally. Unfortunately, this connectivity also leaves valuable materials vulnerable to bots and scrapers.
As a company driven by its intellectual property (IP), CellarTracker has had its fair share of struggles against this type of challenge. Eventually, its founder turned to StackPath’s Web Application Firewall (WAF), which is designed to protect websites and applications from these attackers while ensuring that no legitimate users or developers become locked out.
About CellarTracker
CellarTracker is the world’s largest database of wine and cellar management information, featuring extensive collections of reviews and personal anecdotes from wine enthusiasts. The website has proven a valuable tool for wine collectors seeking to manage their lots and for the public to research and learn about different brands and tasting notes.
The man behind the brand is Eric LeVine, former Microsoft program manager and long-time wine connoisseur. He created CellarTracker in 2003 to keep track of his wine collection without any intention of turning it into a business. But, after sharing the website with two friends who also found the tracking system useful, Eric realized that CellarTracker had potential far beyond its initial purpose. So, after a successful beta test, Eric publicly launched CellarTracker in 2004 and quit his job at Microsoft a few months later to manage this new venture.
Today, CellarTracker boasts roughly 10 million annual visitors and hundreds of thousands of collectors tracking more than 141 million bottles of wine. After its humble beginnings as a solo venture, the CellarTracker team now consists of 13 people — and the company’s steady growth is projected to continue.
The Challenge
As a business that relies on search engine optimization (SEO) to drive organic traffic, CellarTracker was highly vulnerable to scrapers and bots that tried to steal its content. This proved to be one of the company’s most significant challenges.
Evidence of this vulnerability appeared early on. Whenever Eric would update CellarTracker with new information — like fixing a typo in a wine description — he would soon find that change reflected across many other websites. It was obvious that scrapers were actively harvesting his company’s data.
Since CellarTracker has an incredibly active user base, it sought to protect its assets without inhibiting legitimate users from interacting with the site. However, this proved increasingly difficult. Sometimes, the company implemented security measures that resulted in access issues for legitimate site users. As a result, the CellarTracker team had to handle each case manually. While this was no minor hassle, disabling the protection would result in the resurgence of bots and scrapers.
CellarTracker is a pure IP business and relies on search engines to generate organic leads. Its relatively unique appearance in the industry has made it the most reliable resource for collectors researching older or more obscure wines. At the same time, almost all scraping activities are designed to emulate search engine traffic. This makes this type of activity exceedingly challenging to catch quickly.
“The analogy I tend to use is that of ants at a picnic,” Eric explains. “They could bring in the super ant, who would just carry the picnic blanket away in one go. But usually, they send an army of 30, 40, or 50,000 ants very slowly over the course of a few weeks to a month, and try not to be noticeable. But by the time you turn around, they’ve gotten the whole picnic. So, it’s fairly maddening.”
Although the site’s original reviews and content fall under copyright protection, any pursuant action would require locating and accusing a named entity. And, because scrapers and bots appear as anonymous internet traffic, they have proven extremely difficult to pin down and hold accountable. As a result, CellarTracker was at risk of losing its edge in the industry.
“If you depend on … your information being freely available to your users, unfortunately, it’s also available to the bad guys who are going to steal it and use it to out-rank you. Why let people compete with you with your own data that you worked so hard to generate and curate? You should protect it. It’s your IP,” Eric emphasizes. And since CellarTracker’s arming asset is its collection of information, protecting it is the number one priority.
The Solution
CellarTracker needed a solution to protect its data from bots and scrapers while allowing legitimate traffic to access its website without hindrance. Eventually, Eric turned to StackPath WAF for help.
StackPath WAF offers many key features to help CellarTracker keep its information safe, including:
- Anti-Automation Suite and Bot Traffic Protection. This patented technology identifies threats like traffic anomalies and headless browsers to stop scrapers before they reach crucial information.
- Two Tier Architecture. StackPath WAF uses a centralized WAF Intelligence Cluster that inspects and evaluates access requests to determine whether to allow or block new traffic. Its intelligent learning capabilities help to update criteria for locating new threats.
- Device-level Fingerprinting. Rather than evaluating individual IP addresses, this patented technology examines individual devices to differentiate suspicious traffic from legitimate multi-device users.
With the fortified protection of StackPath WAF, Eric and his team can take a step back from their once necessary hyper-vigilance. They can confidently let StackPath take care of the tedious security details that once occupied arduous levels of attention.
Furthermore, CellarTracker experiences benefit beyond WAF’s bot and scraper protection. StackPath also helps CellarTracker differentiate its different classes of users based on types and amounts of activity — all while ensuring that their access to the site would remain a smooth experience.
Perhaps most significantly, StackPath WAF enables Eric to ensure that his brand and website remain an authority in the field. Its IP remained protected from unscrupulous competitors and available to the users who most rely on it.
Reflecting on CellarTracker’s progress, Eric states, “Continuing to preserve the value of the data is the lifeblood of our business. And StackPath is critically important in that regard. I hope more and more customers understand why they should have this kind of protection because the business risk is significant.”
The Future
As CellarTracker progresses, Eric wants to branch out to reach more casual users. Currently, most of the company’s user base consists of avid wine collectors. And while the dedicated team plans to continue tapping into the wine collector market (an estimated 30 million wine collectors in the US alone), they’re also seeking to become the go-to place for wine research for the greater public.
This entails enabling API access to content and data, which CellarTracker has never done before but is now planning to incorporate. At the moment, Eric and his team are working on creating a browser extension that can follow users during their online wine-browsing journeys.
“The idea is, if you’re on an auction site and you drill down to the page for wine, we’ll pop up showing the community rating and reviews, et cetera,” Eric explains.
Of course, with public-facing APIs come risks of more bots and scrapers — and StackPath is ready to help keep CellarTracker safe.
“With a browser extension, we need to have a fairly public endpoint. So, we’re looking at ways we can protect it. When we do launch that, we want that to be public. So, we’ll be in touch for sure,” Eric enthusiastically assures.
Conclusion
In today’s open market, protecting your IP is more crucial than ever, especially if, like CellarTracker, your business relies on curated content.
StackPath WAF can help protect your IP while saving you money. It lowers your total operational costs by reducing bandwidth consumption and downtime and helping you optimize your assets. WAF is easy to set up, featuring built-in policies that tackle the most common threats right out of the box. Our team can also help you tailor a plan to fit your unique needs.
You can rely on WAF to ensure your data is secure from emerging threats, so you can focus on growing your business.
To learn more, check out StackPath WAF for your website protection needs.