When an online shopper places an item into their shopping cart, the product is often removed, temporarily, from the merchant’s inventory, meaning it is not available to other shoppers. Typically, the cart will return the item to available inventory after a time of inactivity by the shopper. Inventory hoarding is the practice by an attacker of using a bot to repeatedly place an item in a cart, making it unavailable for sale over an extended time. An attacker’s motive may be to hurt store sales or perhaps drive up a product’s scarcity, and thus value, on the market.