What are Sneaker bots and how are they used?

Online sneaker reselling has become a profitable business, with even 16-year old kids earning tons of dollars by outearning their parents. However, sneaker reselling is far from being simple as it appears to be. This is because the sneaker purchasing websites have implemented highly restricted measures such as the number of pairs per purchase and

Online sneaker reselling has become a profitable business, with even 16-year old kids earning tons of dollars by outearning their parents. However, sneaker reselling is far from being simple as it appears to be. This is because the sneaker purchasing websites have implemented highly restricted measures such as the number of pairs per purchase and limiting the buying period.

So in this article, we will look at the primary method that eases your purchasing process using sneaker bots. So let’s dive in.

What are sneaker bots and how do they work?

Say that the online sale for the next Nike limited edition sports shoes just started, and you begin to purchase a pair by selecting them and adding them to the shopping cart. After that, you complete the form, and you are about to experience a shocking surprise when you hit the ‘checkout’ button. That is when you see the ‘Sold out’ message. No wonder you will be in a state of surprise thinking, how come someone proceeds in a split of seconds when the limited edition sale just began. Well, it is due to sneaker bots.

So  Sneaker bot is an automated software to speed up and automate the sneaker buying process. You assume that multiple users are purchasing the shoes. However, it’s a single user who carries it by automating a bot, making the checkout process much faster than a human.

Sneaker bots are snowballing in the reselling industry, as most sellers limit the number of purchases to one. Although a bot can speed up the buying process, to bypass the limits on the number of pairs, you would have to use a pool of rotating proxies with a bot. We will look into this in more detail later but for now, let’s move on what you need to carry out botting effectively.

Where to get Bots?

Acquiring sneaker bots can be complicated as acquiring Sneakers, as you saw in the last section. Bot developers release their products through Twitter announcements. There are a limited number of copies available for purchase at retail. Once the copies are sold out, the users resell them for a hefty amount. Thus the majority of the people get their bots from resale or re-stocks for a price ranging from $1,000-$8,000.

Different types of bots commonly used are Shopify, Supreme, Footsites, Nike, and Adidas Bots. 

Avoiding scamming

When people buy bots, they often do it via a middleman. The majority of these middlemen are genuine, but be aware of the scammers. These scammers or fake middlemen will often trick you with fake names identical to that of actual middlemen. They will scam you as well as the actual middleman by asking for money. However, You can easily distinguish an actual middleman from a fake one by the real number on their profile.

What is a Cook Group?

Cook groups supply critical information on bots release information, botting, site lists, re-stock monitors, social media monitors, and everything you need to know about reselling shoes and other popular items. When you join a Cook group, you can also get exclusive discounts on proxies, bots, and other tools necessary for botting.

Joining a Cook group can be done via Twitter re-stocks, which are usually Shopify re-stocks. So when you join, make sure to read all the guides to know all your roles and responsibilities in botting.

How to use your Sneaker bot for a greater botting experience

Now you know where to purchase a bot, and you must be ready for a unique botting experience. However, having a bot or even an expensive bot doesn’t mean that you can cop any shoe you want. First of all, you need to get used to it, know the delays, how the site works, and whether it has any bot protection. So as a novice botte, you have plenty to learn from by experiencing it. 

Now you will discover some of the essential elements for a successful botting:

How can proxies help for your sneaker bots?

To have a successful botting experience, you need to use proxies. It will have the following benefits:

Helps scrape website successfully– No sneaker website releases its launch time, although they may release the launch date. Therefore, bots can help you to purchase the sneakers as soon as they appear on the website. However, to do so, the bots need to send thousands of requests to the website, and if the website has a bot detection system, it could block the bot. 

This is where proxies appear as your savior by rotating your IP address for every request that the bot makes.

Bypass Anti-bot measures implemented by retailers – most shop owners are aware of the botting, and hence they have taken measures to combat bots. However, with proxies, you can bypass the anti-botting detection software. When you use residential proxies, they will have a physical location, making the bot appear legitimate.

Helps purchase several pairs of sneakers – As discussed previously, most sneaker sellers limit the number of purchases to one for a single user. However, when you use a pool of rotating proxies, the websites consider multiple users purchasing sneakers.

Finally, when it comes to proxies, your obvious choices are Residential and Datacenter proxies. However, since the Datacenter proxies do not rotate, their IPs are likely to get banned. Therefore you need to use residential proxies, which frequently rotates IP addresses and has higher bot protection.

Gmail accounts

For websites such as Supreme, Shopify, Yeezy supply, and Footsites, Gmail accounts are preferred. What Gmails generally do is when a captcha pop-ups in any of these sites, the Gmail will make it easier to solve the Captcha.

Aged Gmail accounts are preferred as the older the Gmail, the Captcha it provides, is easier to solve. So you have to make sure that it doesn’t look fake.

How to get Credit Card Profiles

Since all these sites mentioned above don’t allow save profile checkouts anymore, you need to create virtual credit cards. Once you sign in for a credit card, they provide you a virtual credit card, and you can sign for unlimited amounts with different names and addresses. This way the selling website will feel that the requests are coming from multiple users.

Conclusion

So you now have fundamental knowledge on how Sneaker bots work and various technologies associated with them. As you just discovered, working with Sneaker bots is not an easier task, and you need to enhance your botting skills with time. We hope what you learned here will be pretty helpful to those involved in the retail sneaker industry.

Frequently Asked Questions

Are Sneaker bots illegal?

Currently, in the US, it’s not illegal. However, you need to check the terms and conditions of certain websites with the usage of bots. Most websites such as Shopify, Supreme, Nike, and Adidas are aware of the use of sneaker bots and hence update their online protection against them regularly

What are Bot Delays?

There are two types of delays – monitor and checkout. Monitor delays tell the bot how quickly it should refresh when searching for a product. Checkout delays say to the bot how long it should wait before checking out when you put a product into the cart. The purpose of these delays is to avoid getting bans from the sites for plenty of requests and simulate human behavior.

What does jigging mean?

When you are applying for virtual credit cards, if you put the same address, the chances are that the website you are going to purchase the sneakers will reject it. This is where you can use a technique called jigging. For example, suppose for the first credit card, if you put the address as 70 Atkinson Avenue, then for the following address, you could put the same avenue with the same number but as apartment 1. Similarly, the next as apartment 2 and apartment and so on.