John Smith started shopping early on a recent Wednesday and didn’t stop for days.
He visited an auto-supply site where he loaded his cart with a replacement turn-signal lever, emergency strobe light and two dozen other items. He hopped over to a home-goods merchant for another 10 items including wood picture frames, address plaques, a towel rack and mailbox. He ordered one of every kind of baby bundle, ranging from about $80 to nearly $500, from a site that sells infant sleeping boxes popular in places such as Finland.
When the roughly 48-hour spree was over, John Smith did what he always does. He walked away without buying anything.
For more than a year, online merchants selling items ranging from kayaks to keychains have puzzled over the mystery shopper with the generic name behind thousands of abandoned carts. Each cart has only one item.
It is more than a nuisance. John Smith’s activity skews analytics that online merchants use to advertise and make other critical business decisions. The shopper also uses a bunch of bogus email addresses, and sellers get warned by their internet service providers for sending follow-up pitches to phantom customers. Some worried the aborted sprees were the work of a competitor or hacker.
Shawn Bercuson perks up at the mention of John Smith. The chief executive of FinnBin Inc. first spotted the shopper on his site, which sells Scandinavian-inspired boxes for newborns to sleep in, over a year ago.
At first, he thought it was a corporate client—the address was in the heart of Silicon Valley—ready to make a large order, a gift to new parents. But as more orders popped up from John Smith, he wondered whether a competitor was collecting pricing and other information from his site.
“Then it started getting out of hand,” Mr. Bercuson said. “The amount of abandoned carts we got were just insane.” In May, he said John Smith started and walked away from 73 orders.
FinnBin Inc. had 17 abandoned carts from John Smith over three days in April.
Photo: FinnBin Inc.A part of the original team that founded Groupon Inc., Mr. Bercuson traffics in analytics to make business decisions from advertising to website design. John Smith fouled that up. When shoppers abandon carts, websites typically send an automated email prodding them to finish the purchase. The dozens of emails to John Smith distort the numbers, as does false shopping traffic.
“I want to know what is working and what’s not,” he said.
He turned to message boards for other online merchants to see if he was John Smith’s only target. He quickly found out he wasn’t, but nobody had answers.
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Jeffrey Gornstein thinks of John Smith every day. His site, ComfortHouse.com, which sells home goods such as address plaques and other personalized gifts, has been warned by its email provider about sending emails to nonexistent accounts, due to all the follow-ups sent to John Smith, which bounce back as undeliverable. Every time he gets a readout of recent sales, he scans to see if his foe has visited. He then logs into his email platform to deactivate all the fictitious entries from John Smith.
“There is a very limited window in which to do that,” he said.
Mr. Gornstein said he can’t picture John Smith but has sketched out an identity based on his purchases. He’s a boat owner, or knows one, based on personalized picture frames designed for just such a person. An order for monogrammed leather checkbooks indicates he may prefer an old-fashioned way of paying bills. The coccyx cushion in his cart suggests he may have suffered a fall.
He’s also a romantic, if an attempt to buy a Valentine’s Day wall plaque is to be believed.
One quality not in question: He is hard to pin down.
Jeffrey Gornstein, president of Comfort House, looks over orders from John Smith.
Photo: Naomi GoldIn merchants’ quest to unmask the mystery shopper, some clues pointed to Google. John Smith always uses a Gmail address—john.smith.us2@gmail.com, john.smith.us30@gmail.com and so on. He plugs in Google’s Mountain View, Calif., headquarters for the mailing address, as well as the main number to the company’s switchboard.
Of course, a savvy rival or hacker could easily input such entries to cover their tracks. But without much else to go on, sellers started calling Google.
One gave up after struggling to find anyone with meaningful answers and was pitched on spending advertising dollars with Google. Another said Google told them that the company does spot-check prices but not as frequently as the merchant described.
“They don’t go anywhere,” said Timothy Samuels, web administrator for auto parts chain Levine Automotive, of his inquiries to Google.
He has refrained from blocking the internet protocol address associated with John Smith, of which there are also many, for fear of hurting the site’s search rankings.
When The Wall Street Journal contacted Google in June, a spokesman at the internet giant, after a few days of digging, provided an update: The mystery shopper is a bot of its own creation.
Shawn and Jaime Bercuson, founders of FinnBin Inc., with their two daughters.
Photo: Finnbin Inc.The purpose: making sure the all-in price for the product, including tax and shipping, matches the listing on its Google Shopping platform or in advertisements. It wasn’t to cause angst to merchants due to thousands of abandoned carts.
“We use automated systems to ensure consumers are getting accurate pricing information from our merchants,” a company spokesman said. “This sometimes leads to merchants seeing abandoned carts as a result of our system testing whether the price displayed matches the price at checkout.”
A Google spokesman said the company is looking to clarify how the automated systems will work with merchant websites in the future to avoid confusion. The company also said it would work with merchants to address other issues tied to its shopping programs.
Bots are common in the world of online shopping. Pings often come from Amazon.com Inc. or Microsoft Corp.’s Bing search engine to check prices or index sites. Michael Carr, co-founder of Top Notch Gift Shops, has operated web stores for over two decades and calls John Smith “a very strange bot.” It would try to buy items that the company hadn’t sold for years, but were relegated to unlisted pages.
Ultimately, after struggling to find the source and concluding that the bot has no nefarious motives, he has learned to live with John Smith. When notified by The Wall Street Journal that it was Google, he said, “That does substantiate what we thought.”
“Nobody is on their hind legs,” Mr. Carr said. “But it’s been a mystery.”
Write to Paul Ziobro at Paul.Ziobro@wsj.com
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