SlipStreams

SlipStreamsBot

SlipStreamsBot is the crawler of SlipStreams, a market research tool for online retailers. It reads the product information that online stores publish openly, and nothing else.

It identifies itself as SlipStreamsBot/1.0 (+https://slipstreams.io/bot)

What it fetches

First /robots.txt, before every visit. If that allows it, only these public addresses:

  • /meta.jsonStore currency, country and shipping countries
  • /products.jsonThe public product catalog, 250 products per page
  • /collections.jsonThe list of collections
  • /collections/<handle>/products.jsonThe order of products within a collection

We store product data: titles, prices, variants, availability and links to images. We link to images; we do not copy them.

What it never does

  • Log in, or fetch anything behind a login or password page
  • Add items to a cart or touch checkout
  • Work around a bot check, a block or a rate limit
  • Pretend to be a browser, rotate user agents or use proxies to hide
  • Collect personal data about customers or anyone else

How carefully

  • One request at a time per store, with at least 1.5 seconds between requests
  • At least 1.5 seconds between any two of our requests, across all stores together
  • On HTTP 429 or 430 (too many requests) we wait 5, then 20 seconds, or as long as your Retry-After header asks, up to one minute. After 2 retries we leave your store alone until the next round
  • When we meet a bot check, we stop all requests, to every store, for 30 minutes
  • Most stores are visited about once a day

How to opt out

Add this to your robots.txt:

User-agent: SlipStreamsBot
Disallow: /

We read robots.txt before every visit, so this takes effect the next time we come by. We then stop fetching your store, and we do not come back another way. A rule for User-agent: * is respected in the same way.