A few weeks ago I decided I was going to try and buy a pair of Jordan 1 Retro High OG Hyper Royal's..
tl;dr The BOT industry is a new type of Cartel. The average joe doesn't stand a chance. For everybody that thinks "Wow.. I just need to get my hands on a BOT", just know that you are going up against a powerful group of people. The 'good guys' are going to stop you, and the bad guys have you outnumbered.
I decided to take a 3 pronged approach:
1: Look into buying a Snkrs BOT
2: Look into writing my own Snkrs BOT
3: Try to buy the shoes like a normal person
#1.. The BOT business is a crazy world. The BOT market is set up for resellers, not the 'average joe' and they are priced accordingly. Finding a BOT for sale isn't simple, there are underground BOT marketplaces, or you have to follow the correct Twitter accounts, or actually use ANOTHER BOT to buy a BOT. Then you either buy them at RETAIL price ($$), at re-sale price ($$$) or you can RENT them ($). The entire bot business could take up an entire post on its own. At the end of the day, it takes ~$1k to purchase (or even 'rent') a Bot and the proxies/accounts required to run it. It's actually easier (but still hard to get an account) to buy the shoes directly from a BOT company than it is to buy/use their applications.
#2.. I spent (more than) a few hours writing what turned out to be 3 types of 'home built' bots.
Version (a) is your typical web scraping BOT using tools like Selenium to 'scrape' data from the website.
It would run through the shoe buying process the fastest but required constant changes. Nike's 'anti-bot' measures stop this type of Bot quickly.
Version (b) was to reverse engineer the Snkers API's using WireShark (a little more hardcore)
This got me banned by the Nike servers constantly 🙂 . IMHO.. with a large enough team and resources this would be the correct approach.
Version (c) was to use 'Computer Vision'. (controlling the website using visual cues and 'manual' mouse clicks)
Works the best. however, Nikes Anti-Bot measures can still be triggered if you act like a robot (it's crazy, but they do things like measure mouse movement speed).
#3.. I woke up at 6AM on the 17th and have nothing to show for it.
Unless you want to spend $1,000+ a month, running a 'BOT' to purchase anything (Shoes, video cards.. etc) doesn't work. The big-boy BOTS have made the Ant-Bot industry lots of money, and the Anti-Bot systems make the typical home-grown BOTS/Methods useless.
It's crazy how buying something like a Video Card or a pair of sneakers has turned into an impossible task.