What is really mind blowing is that, if understood correctly, bots would be used to check the availability of a product, that sounds so a "hacky" method, like "seriously people are doing that in 2025".
I'm working right now on an inventory management system for a clinic which would really benefit from pulling the prices and availability from a very specialised online shop. I wish I could just get a large, fully cached status of all items in a json/CSV/whatever format. But they're extremely not interested, so I'm scraping the html from 50 separate categories instead. They'll get a few daily bot hits and neither of us will be happy about it.
If people are scraping data that you're not selling, they're not going to stop - just make it trivially accessible instead in a way that doesn't waste resources and destroy metrics.
Sure you might be willing to build the bot to scrape it... but some other competitors won't go to this effort so it still means a bit of information asymmetry and stops some of your competitors poaching customers / employing various marketing tactics to exploit short term shortages or pricing charges etc.
> 'Why hand your competitors data on a silver plate'?
To lessen the issue from the article and free up server resources for actual customers.
A simple and reliable API? That's different.