STCLab Stabilizes Access to Felissimo's EXPO 2025 Official Online Store with Virtual Waiting Room, Detecting 79.69% of Malicious Bot Traffic

STCLab (Co-representatives: Park Hyung Joon and Kim Ha Dong), a provider of traffic management solutions, announced that it has signed an agreement with Felissimo Co., Ltd. to establish a traffic management system for the EXPO 2025 Official Online Store, supporting stable service operations on its launch day.

Felissimo, a leading direct marketing company in Japan, sells various official licensed products through the EXPO 2025 Official Online Store. The site experienced massive access spikes immediately upon opening.

To prepare for this traffic and to ensure customer convenience and fair purchasing opportunities, Felissimo made early preparations. By introducing STCLab's virtual waiting room solution, NetFUNNEL, Felissimo controlled user inflow step-by-step to prevent server overload. Notably, by setting up a pre-waiting area before the virtual waiting room, they dispersed traffic ahead of peak times, maintaining a stable purchasing flow without access delays or system failures.

Furthermore, to counter malicious bots and unauthorized access rising across the e-commerce industry, Felissimo conducted a Proof of Concept (PoC) for STCLab's bot management solution, BotManager. Applying BotManager to the live environment from April to the end of May, traffic analysis revealed that 79.69% of all access requests originated from automated bots.

In particular, as sales of popular items picked up, access from malicious bots using automated tools—such as resale bots (scalper bots), price scraping, and inventory monitoring bots—surged rapidly. The ratio of bot traffic in May grew four-fold compared to April.

Kunihiro Ichihashi of Felissimo commented: 'Since the EXPO 2025 Official Online Store is an environment where many users access simultaneously, it is crucial to provide fair purchasing opportunities to all customers. NetFUNNEL offers excellent cost-effectiveness compared to competitors, and we are highly satisfied. Furthermore, during the implementation of BotManager, no false positives blocking normal users' purchases were found, confirming high stability and reliability in our live production environment.'

STCLab's Co-representatives, Park Hyung Joon and Kim Ha Dong, stated: 'Our virtual waiting room solution NetFUNNEL, built on our traffic control technology, has consistently delivered stable service operations in high-traffic environments across various large-scale events in Japan. We will continue to advance our traffic management technologies to support large-scale events and e-commerce environments.'