Originally comfort-based and often associated with hip-hop culture, sneakers have quickly developed as the new trendy and must-have piece of clothing. Nowadays, some sneakers are becoming very valuable items due to the high demand and the “hype” around them. As such, some sneakers are even sold up to 10 times their resale price. However, this new business has left some customers with nothing but frustration since people are now willing to pay a robot to buy their pair of sneakers faster.
This is how “bots” have developed, making it easier for certain people to buy very limited sneakers and sell them for a profit.
- From queuing outside to using a robot
Sneakers have truly found their place at the fashion table, and brands know it. As such, there are new “releases” as often as every week, where a new high-end pair gets all the attention.
Sneakers have seen different starting points according to the sociologist Yuniya Kawamura, the biggest one probably being the Air Jordan 1. Created in 1984, this pair is still selling from 3,500$ up to 30,000$ depending on size and condition.
Back in the days, in order to get a pair of sneakers, people would just go to the store. Yet, the most determined ones would queue for a few hours before the store opened, or even the night before. But these times are long gone due to the increase of online shopping, and of course bots’ use.
These bots are basically queuing for you, adding the item you desperately need to a cart, filling up your information and paying. The beauty behind it is that everything is done quite instantly.
These very useful bots are named after “robots”. Indeed, they are programs destined to execute a specific task, usually a very repetitive one. By using a bot, “consumers” are capable of rapidly buying their sneakers and, most of the time, sell them for a huge profit.
So, queuing outside of a store has shifted to setting up a program that can do the hard work for you. Most of the biggest releases now happen online, and businesses, as well as loyal consumers, have to deal with the overpresence of bots. Indeed, Queue-it, a Danish company which has developed systems to help with websites traffic congestion, has conducted an audit after a sneaker drop from a famous brand. They found out that 97% of the activity was “inorganic” with different requests from bots. In total, out of the 1.7 million visitors during the drop, only 100,000 of them were actual human customers.
These numbers alone can explain how powerful bots can be, hence why a presentation of what they can do is necessary.
- A wide variety of bots
Bots can act quicker than humans by filling out the consumers’ details. In order to do so, bots usually use proxies to have more IP addresses trying, at the same time, to add the sneakers to the cart. This is way more efficient than having one single IP address trying several times. Moreover, some bots also come with a VPN, thus encrypting the user’s data.
There are different types of shopping bots when it comes to sneakers:
- Scraping bots which scan the web looking for releases
- Scalper bots which buy a product as soon as it becomes available
- Denial of inventory bots which hold items in a cart and purchase it only when it is sold on another website (for a profit)
- Footprinting bots which search for articles unreleased to the public yet
- Account creating bots which create a large amount of fake accounts
- All in one bots which are able to do all of this
These bots are programmed to obey some instructions, which are called a script. These predefined instructions will then be “triggered” by a specific event, such as a sneakers’ release. Thus, if one were to use a bot, they would have to give instructions on the website, the product, the billing and shipping. This gives certain people an unfair advantage on others, especially in regards to exclusive sneakers. This happened with the much awaited collaboration between Corteiz and the Air Max 95 where more than 1,000 orders were cancelled due to the use of bots.
There is no doubt that bots have completely changed the rules. However, one might wonder how dangerous this is, and whether it is legal.
- Dangers and lawfulness
The rise of bots has negatively impacted businesses. Indeed, there is a lost connection with real customers as the users behind bots don’t really care about the online store they are buying from. They are simply looking for the best profit. This will, eventually, damage the brand’s reputation as true customers will feel frustrated. On that note, a study shows that “97% of businesses report their customer satisfaction has been impacted by bot attacks”. Bots can also alter the business’ data with the use of fake accounts, increase operational costs and cause websites crashes. Supreme, a famous streetwear brand, reported 986 million pageviewers and 1.9 billion purchase attempts in one day, which illustrates how bots can even lead to DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks.
Yet, the use of a bot is not unlawful in itself, as long as the bot is doing something legal, such as buying sneakers. The US tried to legislate with the Better Online Tickets Sales Act but it has only been enforced once since 2016. But what’s even more interesting is how online stores respond : they have changed their Terms & Conditions to tackle the issue. They can now, if the use of a bot is detected, cancel the order and charge a restocking fee. Lastly, some other measures are being tested such as virtual waiting rooms, invite only sales or access for specific customers.
With a market valued at 72.7 billion dollars in 2022, sneakers have become an industry giant. Therefore, bots have been developed, and still continue to do so. Indeed, some of the most advanced bots are now capable of bypassing CAPTCHAs (“Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”). With image classification algorithms or even generative alternative networks which are often used in deep learning, bots are getting more efficient.
Léonard SIMOENS
M2 Cyberjustice – Promotion 2023/2024
Sources :
- https://www.proxyvpn.fr/bot-sneakers
- https://www.imperva.com/learn/application-security/sneaker-bot/
- https://queue-it.com/blog/sneaker-bot-prevention/
- https://www.wired.com/2017/05/using-bots-to-buy-supreme-limited-edition-streetwear/
- https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/3276/text
- https://theconversation.com/the-history-of-sneakers-from-commodity-to-cultural-icon-127268
- https://www.avast.com/c-what-is-a-bot
