How do you keep a storefront up during a Diwali or BFCM sale?
Two things kill sale-day uptime. Volumetric DDoS aimed at the checkout, and bot traffic that eats inventory and skews cache hit rates. We put Cloudflare Magic Transit or AWS Shield Advanced at the edge for volumetric absorption. We tune WAF rules so legitimate promo landing traffic gets through while scripted requests get challenged. Bot management (Cloudflare Bot Management, DataDome or PerimeterX) separates scalpers from real customers. Then we rehearse the runbook with the ops team the week before the sale so the on-call knows exactly which lever to pull at 11:59pm.
How do you reduce PCI-DSS scope for a marketplace or D2C brand?
Tokenisation with an approved provider (Razorpay, Cashfree, Juspay, Stripe or your acquiring bank) means the actual PAN never touches your servers. We map every place card data currently flows, replace direct capture with iframe or hosted-fields, and segment the reduced CHD environment behind its own network boundary. Post-work, most brands qualify for SAQ A instead of SAQ D. That is where the audit cost and control burden drop by an order of magnitude. Annual pen test and ASV scans still apply, we handle both.
How is your bot protection different from what Cloudflare gives out of the box?
Cloudflare Bot Management is the tooling. What matters is the rules. A generic setup blocks obvious bad bots but lets checkout scrapers and inventory watchers through because their traffic shape looks like a mobile browser. We instrument your specific endpoints (search, product detail, add-to-cart, checkout) and build rules per endpoint. Rate limits per session, not just per IP. Fingerprint velocity checks. Business logic rules for inventory hoarding. All logged so fraud ops can review and tighten weekly.
What is checkout abuse and why do we need rules for it?
Card testing at scale (thousands of failed auths against your gateway from a botnet), coupon stacking with generated accounts, refund abuse loops, address enumeration to game COD workflows. Payment gateways catch some of it but not all, because the abuse pattern often looks like normal traffic in isolation. We build detection rules that correlate signals across account creation, coupon use, address velocity and payment failure rate. Alerts land in the fraud ops queue with the raw session for review.
Do we need DPDP compliance if we already have a privacy policy?
Yes. DPDP Act 2023 requires more than a privacy policy. It requires consent capture at the point of collection (with a clear notice), purpose limitation (you cannot use address data for marketing if consent was for delivery), the ability to serve access and erasure requests inside timelines, and a 72-hour breach notification playbook to the Data Protection Board. We do a data-flow map, gap review, and build the consent + erasure + notification workflows your ops team can actually run.
Do you work with Shopify Plus, Magento, WooCommerce and custom stacks?
Yes to all. Shopify Plus and custom stacks on AWS / GCP get similar treatment at the edge (WAF, bot management, CDN rules). For self-hosted platforms like Magento and WooCommerce we also handle server hardening, secrets rotation, admin-panel access controls, and dependency vulnerability management. For headless commerce (Next.js storefront + commerce API) we tune the WAF and rate limits per API surface, since the attack shape is different from a monolithic store.
How much does an e-commerce security engagement cost?
Storefront + checkout VAPT: Rs. 1.5 to 4 lakh depending on the surface (public store + admin + API). Sale-event DDoS + bot defence setup: Rs. 2 to 5 lakh plus vendor licence cost. PCI-DSS scope reduction sprint: Rs. 4 to 8 lakh depending on how much of the flow currently touches raw card data. Managed WAF + SOC retainer: Rs. 80,000 to 2 lakh per month. Fixed-price scoping in 48 hours.