How to stop AI preview abuse on your store: limits, IP and country blocks
Any AI feature you put on a public product page has the same shape of problem. It costs you money every time it runs, and it runs for whoever asks — including people who are not customers, are not in a country you ship to, and in some cases are not people.
- Published
- Reading time
- 5 minutes
Country
Where you ship
IP range
Not blocked
Per visitor
Under the limit
Spending cap
Always applies
Trusted customers skip country, IP and per-visitor rules — and still meet the spending cap.
This is not a reason to avoid the feature. It is a reason to set the limits before you switch it on, which takes about five minutes and is the step most stores skip.
Why previews are different from the rest of your site
Serving a product page costs you a fraction of a penny in bandwidth. Generating an image preview costs materially more, every single time, with no cache to save you — each preview is of a different shopper’s photo, so nothing is reusable.
That changes the maths on traffic you would normally be glad of. A hundred extra visitors is good news on a product page. A hundred visitors each generating fifteen previews is a bill.
Three sources of unwanted load, in rough order of likelihood:
Enthusiastic browsers. Not abuse at all. A customer comparing forty wrap colours on their car is your best prospect and your most expensive visitor. They are the reason per-visitor limits exist.
Scrapers and bots. Automated traffic that finds any public endpoint and hits it. They are not trying to cost you money; they do it anyway.
Deliberate abuse. Someone who has worked out that your button runs an expensive model and decides to find out how expensive.
The controls worth setting
| Control | Stops | Set it to |
|---|---|---|
| Spending limit | Everything, bluntly | A number you would be unbothered to see on an invoice |
| Per-visitor limit | Enthusiastic browsers and casual abuse | Enough for a real decision — comparing several options, not forty |
| IP range blocking | Bots and repeat offenders from one source | Reactive: add ranges when you see them |
| Country blocking | Traffic from places you do not ship to | Match your actual shipping list |
| Email blocking | A specific identified abuser | Reactive |
| Trusted customers | Nothing — it is the exception | Your repeat buyers and wholesale accounts |
Spending limit
The one that actually protects you. Everything else is refinement; this is the hard stop. Set it first, before the feature goes live, at a figure you would be comfortable losing entirely in a bad week.
Per-visitor limits
The most useful dial day to day. A shopper deciding between a few options needs a handful of previews. A shopper running thirty is either very undecided or not shopping.
Set this generously enough that a genuine comparison is not cut off, and tightly enough that a loop stops early. If you sell something people legitimately compare at length — wrap finishes, wallpaper patterns — set it higher there than on apparel.
IP range and country blocks
These are reactive tools. You will not know which ranges to block until you see the traffic, so the useful habit is checking preview volume weekly for the first month and blocking ranges that stand out.
Country blocking is proactive and easy: if you only ship to three countries, previews outside them are cost with no possible revenue attached.
The trusted-customer list
The one that makes the others safe to use.
Blunt limits occasionally catch the wrong person — a good customer on a shared office network, a wholesale buyer working through a large order, someone whose ISP recycled an address you blocked last month. A list of customers who always get a preview regardless means you can set everything else tightly without the limits costing you a sale.
If you set only two things, set the spending limit and the trusted list.
A sensible starting configuration
- Spending limit on, at a figure you would shrug at.
- Per-visitor limit on, generous but finite.
- Country blocking matched to where you actually ship.
- IP and email blocking off, ready to use reactively.
- Trusted customers populated with your repeat and wholesale accounts.
- Previews enabled on a handful of products, not the whole catalogue.
Then look at the volume after a week. Most stores find the limits never bind, which is the outcome you want — the protection was cheap and nothing was lost.
What not to do
Do not put the feature behind a login to control cost. It works, and it removes most of the value: the shopper who most needs convincing is the one who has not signed up. Limits let you keep it open instead.
Do not set limits so tight that normal use hits them. A customer who is told they have run out of previews while deciding is worse off than a customer who never had any.
Do not skip the review. The controls are only as good as the one look you take at the numbers in week one.
Where this fits
What a preview takes to run is also an engineering decision, not only a policy one. Choosing a lighter image model is what made it possible to offer previews to anonymous visitors at all — the reasoning is in what we learned building a preview tool, and the setup side is in adding previews to a BigCommerce store.
Questions people ask
What happens when a shopper hits their limit?
They are told, politely, that no further previews are available. Nothing else about the product page changes.
Will blocking a country affect my search visibility?
Blocking previews is not blocking your pages. Crawlers index the product page as normal; they are not generating previews.
Can I change limits without reinstalling?
Yes. They are settings, adjustable at any time.
How do I know if I am being abused rather than just popular?
Look at previews per visitor. Many visitors with a few each is popularity. Few visitors with very many each is not.
Does the trusted list override the spending limit?
The spending limit is the hard stop by design. Trusted customers bypass the per-visitor and block rules, not the overall cap.
Is there a free tier so I can test the limits first?
Install and try it on a few products before opening it to the catalogue — see the install walkthrough.
