A lot of the major sites now use lottery systems. You have 10 minutes to enter the lottery and your enter time doesn't affect outcome. You could fiddle with % by having multiple entries, but you'd need a unique credit card per entry.<p>I'm pretty big into sneakers and have found the bot game to be really interesting, and how companies are fighting it by removing "first-come first-served" is a rational response.
I’ve worked on ticket touting legislation for my own Parliament for two years now. It’s surprisingly complex and naturally has an unsurprisingly monied lobby funding opposition.<p>I find the parallels here very interesting and the suggestion from the first comment that a lottery could be deployed for all who purchase within the first X minutes. Maybe that’s the way forward for tickets too.
I have a friend that is all into this, mostly as a hobby. There's also a Funko Pop market as well. Really, if there's high value behind it, there's an arbitrage market that goes along with it.<p>It's pretty big, there's markets for residential IP lists, bots that mock organic web traffic by browsing Google and watching YouTube so they can defeat recaptcha, there's even escrow services so that you don't have to sell out of your house.<p>There's groups that track potential high value product releases and coordinate large buys. It's mutually beneficial for them to work together, because unauthentic demand boosts the resell market.<p>I don't know if I approve of it, because groups work out large fandoms and potential demand, and effectively price out segments of the population to take a cut off of the top. But I do have to sit back and marvel at how much technology and research goes into neutering antibot measures.
A friend of mine is making thousands per month simply selling notification bot subscriptions to people who run private discords. His don't even buy, they just send stock notifications to the rooms. Madness.
Yeah - I like to say that I did my time in the sneaker world. It’s extraordinarily profitable but it’s also extraordinarily toxic. I’ll probably end up writing something long-form about it.<p>Biggest thing that you wouldn’t know looking in from the outside is that bots can only get you so far. Bots for well-known sites are basically at their theoretical limits. Bad server-side software basically makes it random whether you’ll actually get in at that point.<p>Information is what really determines whether sneakers are going to be profitable or a complete waste of time. I ran with groups of people who had relationships with employees of all the big sneaker manufacturers (primarily Nike and Adidas). I’d know months in advance what was going to release and, perhaps more importantly, what was going to re-release (causing the price of existing pairs to crash).<p>People belonged to strong (and private) groups. Never too big, ~15 people was the max for the really good ones. Usually you’d have a slack channel with a ton of integrations, anywhere from simple in-stock notifications to full bot integrations that would allow you to buy sneakers with a saved credit card by tapping a button on the notification (so much for PCI compliance).<p>Those groups are difficult to access. You have to build up a reputation before you have a chance, most of the good ones will literally interview you. You’d pretty much be blacklisted if you leaked information. Overall it’s a lot like cracking culture if it suddenly became 100% legal.
I used to make/sell these bots back when I was in high school in the early 2010s. It was a great way to learn programming and make some money flipping sneakers on the side. The bot scene was in its reaaal early stages so I had a lot of fun catching up as Nike (nobody cared about Adidas at all back then) kept trying different types of lottery systems and captchas to figure out what would stick. Learned early on that notification systems were the best way to go.
At this point reps (fakes) get so close to the real thing I couldn't imagine spending the money on the real thing unless you were collecting them. If you want to wear the shoe, why not just buy a 1:1 rep instead and save hundreds.
Reminds me of when I wrote a bot to buy Supreme gear when I was still a student. Got a fair bit of desirable stuff, most of which was sold at a nice margin.