Sneaker Bot - Every What, Why, and How To Know About It

Sneaker Bot - What is it?

To keep it simple, this bot is all about sneakers and sneaker lovers. Well, it’s true. It’s a kind of sophisticated program that sneaker-buyers use to automate the time-consuming yet essential aspect of online check-out so that purchase time is reduced.

This is useful when there are limited or timed deals on sneakers When a store or brand launches an exclusive sneaker collection, it works on a first-come first-serve basis. Those who manage to close a deal early will get the product. The Manual check-out process can consume time that can lead to an expired deal or empty stocks.

This is why sneaker buyers take the help of the sneaker bot app. The bot quickly completes the purchase procedure and helps you grab an exclusive deal. As they are only used to purchase sneakers, they are often referred to as shoe bots. Limited edition sneakers have great demand in the sneakerheads community. That’s why many people use sneaker bots to buy them in bulk and resell them at a high cost.

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How it works?

Those who are seeking help from a sneaker bot have to take the help of the sneaker bot app and provide essential details beforehand. In general, details like credit card information, billing address, shoe size, and many others are provided.

After providing this basic information, the user will specify the kind of purchase the bot has to make. Sneaker buyers might collect the upcoming sneaker collection details from the online store, brand’s website, online communities like Quora & Reddit, and other cook groups.

Based on this information, users will enter product-specific keywords or URLs to help the sneaker bot identify the kind of product they want to get. The bot becomes active when all the pre-defined sneaker-buying criteria are met. As all the key details are already there, the check-out and buying process becomes too quick.

If the website has imposed any limitations on per customer quantity then the sneaker bot bypasses this restriction by refreshing the web pages so that the desired quantities are added to the cart and purchased.

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Are sneaker bots legitimate?

Practically speaking, using sneaker bots isn’t an illegal task but it’s unethical. Sneaker bots are advertised online and are even sold via proper channels. You don’t have to visit the dark web to get a sneaker bot. As long as you’re not violating any law or not paying for a purchase, using sneaker bots isn’t a crime.

But, it’s not ethical in the sense that it will lead to uneven distribution of exclusive items. 

Buyers, using sneaker bot apps, will end up buying more items while others won’t get a deal even after trying again and again. Established sneaker brands like Nike, Adidas, Air Jordan, and many more are aware of this sneaker bot strategy and have made it very clear that purchases by sneaker bots can be canceled anytime. These stores even adopt best practices to avoid the use of sneaker bots. 

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How do sneaker bots affect business?

A Cyber sneaker bot influences adversely to sneaker industry and businesses in unfathomable ways. Have a look at the most prominent ones.

• Reduce brand image

When bots are buying all the stocks and real customers are not able to get any product, they get frustrated. Customers will think that the brand or online store is faking the exclusive collection launch, which is not true. They will stop visiting the site in the future and will spread negative word of mouth. These all things will damage the brand image beyond repair.

• A significant drop in brand loyalty

Customers who are linked with the brand for a long time and are not getting access to exclusive deals or collections will become agitated. They might even drop their loyalty to a brand that is not good in any sense.

• Unwanted overheads

When bots are involved in purchases, the company website gets excessive yet unwanted traffic on the website. Management of such unrequired traffic will add an extra burden on bandwidth and overheads. The operational cost will go up in certain cases as well.

• Underperforming website

The excessive bot traffic will increase the burden on the website and crash it completely for your real and committed buyers. Having an underperforming website isn’t good in many aspects. For instance, it will drop the SEO ranking of the brand and will break the trust of loyal customers. Both these situations are not good or useful.

• Less future prospects 

When a website is getting fake traffic, the online store won’t be able to have a hold over quality and genuine customer leads. If continued for long, the store will end up having no future prospects.

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How do sneaker shoes go unnoticed?

From the above text, it’s very much clear that the presence of sneaker bot open source isn’t a good sign for sneaker companies and online stores. 

This is why these companies adopt best practices to avoid sneaker bot usage. However, using certain advanced processes helps sneaker bots bypass the standard bot protection means and continue their operations.

Captcha bypass

Many sneaker online stores adopt the CAPTCHA confirmation step as a part of website access to avoid bot access. However, the current line of sneaker bot open source has become so advanced that they can conveniently overcome this hurdle. 

The most commonly used techniques to circumvent the CAPTCHA requirement includes taking the help of offshore humans, bringing the image classification process into action, and using GAN or generative adversarial networks technology.

With these technologies and processes, sneaker bots will fool the CAPTCHA mechanism and access the website. 

Imitating human behavior

The sneaker bot algorithm has become so advanced that they are capable of making others think that they are actual human beings. As the attackers know how to use a sneaker bot, they do everything to fool businesses and buyers.

Real-life human behavior like slow mouse movements, natural keystrokes, errors in sentences, using backspace, and not giving responses at supersonic speed will make a website server misjudge a sneaker bot as a real customer and will process the request.

Fake browser fingerprints

In the majority of sneaker bot tutorial resources, it’s explained that the bot must know how to fake browser-specific fingerprints to go unnoticed. This is the most common tactic to continue operation. Under this technique, the sneaker bots will generate specific and real-time HTTP and browser initials so that the web server of any other bot detection technology won’t be able to spot the presence of the sneaker bot.

Resident IP addresses

Using datacenter proxies is the worst practice to adopt when one is using the sneaker bot. For undetectable operations, one should use residential IP addresses. Some of the most advanced bots like Nike & Adidas bots use such IP addresses to give real-time human vibes. 

Low volume of requests per IP address

Sneaker bots are different from other kinds of bots. They don’t have to get involved in thousands of purchases at the time as the collection is already limited. So, complex sneaker bots don’t make the mistake of hoarding the website with tons of traffic and getting banned. 

Instead, they spend comparatively fewer requests from a single IP address. Some might use a VPN to switch IP addresses frequently making it hard to spot or track them. The use of residential IP addresses also reduces request count per IP.

Preventing Sneaker Bot Attack With Wallarm

Sneaker bot attack doesn’t have pleasing outcomes and customary bot prevention methods might fail in front of inventive sneaker bot. Hence, one must seek updated and ultra-modern bot prevention assistance from Wallarm.

Wallarm is an API and cloud security platform that offers assorted bot attack prevention solutions. For instance, one can deploy its Cloud WAF product. The WAF features a nearly zero false-positive rate and is packed with a couple of modern attack detection techniques.

Its API security platform is capable of protecting APIs of all sorts. Everything from threat detection to threat removal is well-taken care of by this service. If you’re not sure about the capability of your existing WAF, try the GoTestWAF platform of Wallarm. It will help you find out whether or not the WAF you’re using is capable of blocking the sneaker bots.

With such extensive assistance, it’s easy to keep the sneaker bot involvement as less as possible and enjoy authentic traffic/customer base.