The digitalization of the shopping experience has brought new opportunities and challenges to us, the consumers. In the last decade, and especially during the pandemic, the importance of online shops has increased exponentially, and the percentage of digital purchases already makes up 20% of transactions, with numbers higher in western countries.
Online shopping skews the availability of goods – when nobody has to travel to buy products and services, their stock diminishes faster. In-store transitions are simple and one-dimensional: a client enters the shop and buys the desired products and waits in line if there are more customers. Digital transactions can be performed manually or automated in many ways that accelerate the process or let the tech-savvy customer manipulate digital identities and buy multiple products at the same time.
While an automated and accelerated shopping experience is mostly harmless and rarely used for purchases of consumable goods, and other everyday products, it ruins the heavily contested transactions for limited edition goods, where the retailer tries to create a fair environment, where anyone fast enough can buy rare products.
Automated purchases plague e-commerce, with the biggest focus on the sneaker market. The enthusiasts of sports apparel cannot get their hands on new, rare shoes because scalpers and resellers dominate the market with automated bots and sneaker proxies. In this article, our goal is to educate new and old-school sneakerheads on the technical details of online transactions, why bots dominate the market, and how you can use them to give tech-savvy customers a run for their money.
Sneaker bots, just like most automated software online, use proxy servers to hide their identity and multiply the internet access points used for many parallel purchases. You will learn to find the best proxy servers for bots, which providers have the best sneaker proxies, and why you should never choose even the best proxies for bots if they are free and publicly available.
Attacking the server with connection requests
Unlike in-store experiences, online shops have a hard time controlling overcrowded web servers as if they were rowdy, aggressive customers. Persistent sneakerheads and resellers use sneaker bots to overwhelm the shop with connection requests as constant pressure to perform the checkout when the product drops to give them a bigger chance to complete a successful cop.
Of course, if bombarding the server was so easy, everyone would do it. To stop customers seeking an unfair advantage, and prevent the effectiveness of DDoS attacks, used to slow down or crash the server, owners use rate limiting to filter out the surprisingly aggressive and efficient connection requests that do not resemble a real user. However, with the help of proxy servers and customized sneaker proxies, smart sneakerheads create separate connections, with each bot getting a different IP address. When the requests are spread out among the fake identities but traced back to one user, website owners have no way of knowing that it is one person stealing away all the purchases.
While an honest customer eagerly waits for the drop and tries to complete the purchase as soon as possible, multiple automated bots steal many products without much effort. The only way to compete with technically proficient sneakerheads is to use the same tools for these purchases.
With the sneaker reselling market experiencing massive growth, you can try to write your sneaker bot or buy the multifunctional software to accelerate the process and focus on purchases or even reselling if that was your plan all along.
How to find the best proxies for sneaker copping?
Proxy servers ensure that you can scale up your copping operation, change geolocations if the page is not available in your country, and never reveal your identity in the process.
The advertised sneaker proxies are mostly rotating residential proxies with a few adjusted features. Some suppliers offer datacenter IPs for cops, but they come with a few downsides – while addresses in data centers have better internet speed, they come in bulk, which makes them easy to identify and block by big retailers. Although they are cheaper, you will get nothing from the next drop if offered addresses cannot access the website.
Residential IPs are addresses used by gadgets around the world, supplied by their Internet Service Providers. The ability to rotate IPs ensures that the address behind the bot gets changed before it attracts suspicion. With a wide array of IPs from a good provider, you can protect multiple bots at the same time greatly increasing your chances to walk away with desired products.
Beginner sneakerheads and resellers love to choose free proxies to save money. However, not only are they usually inefficient or unusable due to many devices connecting at the same time, the individuals that set up public proxies can monitor the data in these connections. If you reveal your credit card information and other personal details, you will soon forget about the sneaker drop, as you will have a potential cyberattack to worry about. Only choose the best legitimate providers for your sneaker bots. To learn more about the technicalities, pricing, and use cases for intermediary servers, check out a thorough list of the best proxies made by Proxyway.
