A collaboration between a video game franchise you love and your favorite sneaker brand is finally out. You set a thousand alarms, you register in the store, you add your credit card and your address… you have everything ready. The day it goes on sale, you prepare an hour before in front of the computer. The time has come. You refresh the page, you add the shoes to the cart, you give it to buy. And just when you thought you had achieved it, the website tells you that they are already sold out. The scalpers have won the game again. But how do they do it?
Hoarding the stock. This is how sneaker speculators work
The Internet has a new enemy, the scalpers . Until now, this term was used to refer to those stock traders who buy and sell huge amounts of assets in a few minutes to make money on small price changes. Nowadays, when we talk about ‘scalpers’, we are referring to those who make money by buying a large quantity of a product that has a limited edition in order to control the stock and resell it at a much higher price.
The speculators started selling the products a little more expensive than in the original stores. However, even the scalpers themselves now have competition. This has meant that each time, the products that they manage to buy from the stores are resold more and more expensive , at prices that multiply the original cost.
Slippers are usually one of the most loved products by scalpers . They have limited runs, are in good demand and are also being released simultaneously in numerous stores. However, they are not the only victim. Scalpers are also responsible for the fact that you can’t find a PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X almost anywhere.
How do scalpers act?
This technique really started years ago with the sale of tickets through online sites. Some users managed to buy tickets for sporting events or concerts and then managed to resell them at significantly higher prices. As the business was going, they soon began to polish the technique. Instead of putting a person in front of a computer, scalpers used computer programs to automate the process.
In the case of sneakers, the most common is to use bots . When a model is only sold in a store, they usually program software capable of fully automating the purchase process. On the other hand, with consoles or graphics cards, scalpers do not know on which websites a unit is going to be for sale. For this reason, they use bots —which they program themselves or buy— to check every certain number of minutes the units available on one website or another. When one of the products they want to grab is available, the purchase can be made either manually or with the software: it all depends on the degree of perfection of the bot. For example, for the Supreme website (a brand coveted by these users of opportunism), there are dozens of scripts and plugins that can be found published on GitHub .
On the other hand, there are speculators who have contact with some manufacturers or distributors , and take advantage of that advantage even to sneak in ahead of other scalpers. This modus operandi is less common, but there have also been quite a few cases so far.