In the past, people needed to queue to get their hands on the fresh stuff and there was a clerk that cloud verify your identity. Of course folks could send in t

In the past, people needed to queue to get their hands on the fresh stuff and there was a clerk that cloud verify your identity. Of course folks could send in their friends or use fake documents, yet the degree of the procedure was limited to humans in their flesh. e-commerce sales open the gates to the shop at the same time for everyone. This incentivises massive parallelization of the purchases across accounts, IPs, and identities. Already back in 2017 [1] it's become known to the industry that bots are sniping the purchases faster than humans. Now, we're at a stage where retailers are adjusting their T&Cs to address the resell market [2]. StockX was valued at 2.8B in Dec 2020 [3] and they have to get stock somewhere, right? The bot industry [4] also developed from simple scripts to SaaS offerings with multi-thousand $ subscription prices just to get access to a bot that's proven to work. The user has to provide a list of proxies that will be used to execute the scripting as these are not provided out of the box (and are hard to get). There are numerous guides on YT and advertising on Twitter that show how to use the bots and how they've been used for purchases. And of course, scarcity is not just for streetwear, but for any type of highly sought for products [5]. [1] https://www.esquire.com/style/mens-fashion/news/a55301/using-bots-to-buy-supreme/ https://www.esquire.com/style/mens-fashion/news/a55301/using... [2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/nike-moves-to-crimp-resellers-and-might-cancel-orders-made-using-bots-11665506775 https://www.wsj.com/articles/nike-moves-to-crimp-resellers-a... [3] https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/16/stockx-raises-275m-series-e-valuing-the-retailer-at-2-8b https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/16/stockx-raises-275m-series-... [4] https://www.complex.com/sneakers/how-to-use-sneaker-bots/ https://www.complex.com/sneakers/how-to-use-sneaker-bots/ [5] https://www.wsj.com/articles/desperate-parents-turn-to-shopping-bots-to-hunt-for-hottest-christmas-gifts-11637417633 https://www.wsj.com/articles/desperate-parents-turn-to-shopp...