Pandectes GDPR Compliance
Meets our highest standards for performance, design, and integration. Learn moreOpens in new window
Reviews (3,068)
We spent a significant amount of time trying to get this app working properly with our Shopify store, GTM, GA4, and consent setup. We worked through script blocking, consent timing, custom pixels, network testing, and multiple troubleshooting steps to make sure tracking only fired after a user gave consent.
After implementing Pandectes on our live theme, we saw a massive and completely abnormal spike in GA4 traffic. The traffic was overwhelmingly direct, came from highly suspicious automated-looking users, and did not match what Shopify was reporting. We eventually traced the issue back to behavior that only occurred while Pandectes was active.
To confirm it, we disabled the app and watched GA4 in real time. The abnormal traffic nearly stopped immediately.
When we reached out to Pandectes, they acknowledged that bot traffic can interact with the banner and pointed us to their bot-blocking feature. The problem is that this functionality is only available on their Enterprise plan. In other words, the app created or enabled a serious analytics issue for us, and the recommended solution was to upgrade to a much more expensive plan.
At that point, we had already spent hours auditing scripts, testing consent states, troubleshooting GA4, and trying to make the setup work correctly.
For us, this was not worth the risk or the amount of troubleshooting required. We ultimately decided to remove the app and move toward Shopify’s native consent tools with GTM instead.
If accurate analytics and clean tracking are important to your business, I would be very cautious before installing this app. We wish we had built the consent setup ourselves from the beginning rather than spending this much time troubleshooting an issue we did not have before installing it.
Hi team at Rustic Kitchen and Bath,
Thank you for taking the time to share your feedback. We fully understand how concerning sudden GA4 traffic anomalies can be, and we appreciate the opportunity to clarify how consent banners interact with automated traffic.
First, to reassure merchants reading this: Pandectes does not generate, route, or trigger bot traffic to your site.
When headless bots or automated crawlers (often using synthetic browser signatures like fixed screen resolutions or user agents) visit a site, they interact with the web page scripts, including analytics tags and consent banners. Depending on how your GA4 and GTM tags are configured to handle consent states, automated scripts interacting with a consent UI can inadvertently trigger GA4 pageview events before or upon consent interaction. Turning off a consent banner changes how GTM evaluates tag execution conditions, which alters how and when those bot interactions hit GA4, giving the appearance that the traffic source itself shifted, when in reality, tag firing behavior changed.
Regarding our Bot Detection feature: our app’s core function is privacy compliance (managing consent banners and signal passing). Because specialized bot filtering requires dedicated infrastructure, it is included in our Enterprise tier for high-traffic stores. However, bot traffic itself is an external web phenomenon, and standard GA4 traffic filters or web application firewalls (WAF) can also be used independently to filter these hits.
We regret that your support interaction felt transactional when discussing plan tiers, that is never our intention. We are continuously working to improve how our team guides merchants through complex tag setups.
We wish you all the best with your store and your custom GTM setup, and our team remains available if you ever need technical assistance in the future.
Pandectes Support Team
