Grinch Bots Will Steal the Best Deals This Holiday Season | Hacker News Reader

Grinch Bots Will Steal the Best Deals This Holiday Season

softwarepundit.com

40 pointsmch8233 comments

This was the rage among event tickets about 10 years ago.

Of course the simple fix is to just sell items at the market price.

For tickets, the reason was that they were often sold at under-market price, as the comedian/musician/whatever wanted them affordable.

Why are shoes being sold low, I cannot figure out (I expected electronics to be the most sold).

Selling at market price is counterproductive when the product is part of a larger strategy.

Selling Xboxes and PlayStations for many hundreds or even thousands of dollars is counterproductive because platform and game developers use the consoles as a loss leader for the much more profitable software and microtransactions. No one wants to buy the new Call of Duty if there are too few console owners to find a match.

Your example of concert tickets is interesting- Kid Rock famously employs counter-scalping methods because he does not enjoy performing for bored rich people in the front row. The front two rows cannot be bought at his shows- they pick "real fans" out of the cheapest seats randomly to come enjoy the best seats.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/06/27/196277836/kid-...

I would argue that ticket sales are different to electronics and other goods. It's a one-off event which fans go to rather than electronics that may potentially be limited however can be manufactured no matter what.

What do you mean by "no matter what"? Often when new physical products are in limited supply it is because there are real constraints in the supply chain, not necessarily because of an artificial limit imposed by the manufacturer (although of course that can occur as well).

"no matter what" as in of course there will be limitations to how much a manufacturer can output but there will always be some supply further down the line.

That's like saying "there will be another concert down the line". People buy consumer electronics to buy the experience of using them (especially gaming-related) - and using them now, not 3 months after an anticipated game turns to an old memory. Add to that the holiday season, where gifting it now has even more meaning, and it gets worse.

An artist might visit a single city once every few years vs the previous generation of game consoles (Playstation + Xbox) came out in late 2013 so I don’t get your point.

Or, in regards to tickets. Simply require the name of the attendee on the ticket and don't allow transfers.

True! Though, you're opening up a nightmare for your Customer Success/Support teams. What happens when someone can no longer attend their event? Option 1: Give ticket to a friend, Option 2: Refund the ticket.

If you're looking at Option #2, then you'll need to provide a secondary marketplace for selling off all the last minute tickets that get dumped back into the marketplace.

Source: Past work at a ticketing company

Just give a refund and resell the tickets last minute. You can probably sell them for more last minute.

I see no problem with automated purchasing bots. These bots are only able to exist because people are willing to purchase the products bot-owners are selling at a significantly higher markup. This whole thing would go away if retailers raised their prices or supply to meet demand.

Also, these limited product releases and steep black friday sales are psychologically manipulative. They're designed to create a false sense of exclusivity and urgency for the consumer. I'm happy to see it backfire on retailers.

I’m the owner / developer of Wrath AIO and would like to clarify we don’t support any electronic related stores, nor do we have any plans to

Why not? I would have gladly paid $100 to rent your bot for this one purchase so that I wouldn't have to go on Kijiji to purchase it for $200+ markup.

In the past I would have to pay someone to stand in line. This is just the new economy.

Not sure about the US, but here in Germany, the prices for NVIDIA 3090 are pretty much back to normal. I have an electronics shop within walking distance and they have 2 different 3090 onsite with the cheaper one priced at $1599. (NVIDIA's official launch price was $1499)

Also, it looks like some ppl had a lot of fun annoying the scalpers: https://www.ebay.com/itm/Truly-Custom-Nvidia-GeForce-RTX-309...

So I guess scalpers are only relevant if you need the ego boost of getting a Black Friday deal.

> Grinch bots, otherwise known as scalper bots, are programmed to purchase scarce goods from websites before humans have the chance to do so. This holiday season, grinch bots will purchase over $100 million of sneakers alone. In addition, this rapidly growing software trend will impact clothing, collectibles, computers, electronics, gaming, and any attractive deal where demand outweighs supply.

This has been going on since the beginning of e-commerce https://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/17/us/sony-toy-is-less-costl...

Walmart must have a public API given the number of PS5’s that show up on eBay after a drop.

I was just thinking about making a one off script to grab a ps5 tomorrow. But not for scalping, just to give to my mom to give to my son.

No reason to write one. Google "sneaker bots". There are whole communities on Discord.

The sad thing is that it would be so easy for the retailers to stop the bots (seriously, just put a captcha in the checkout process), but they won't do it because why would they? Why wouldn't they want to sell out instantly and take the money to the bank?

That doesn't make much sense to me. The purpose black friday sales for companies seems to be 1.) to drive customers to their store where they will also buy non-sale items and 2.) to build brand image and name recognition with potential customers. Neither of these objectives are met by selling to scalpers.

yeah, but whats the fun in that.

As far as captcha, for the use case of just running on a local computer to buy one thing you could have it feed the user the captcha to solve over and over.

They are a bit expensive couple hundred bucks to license. Got any favorite communities?

You might do ok watching one of the twitter account that announces drops like @wario64. The bundles are pricy but can generally be bought (GameStop and Costco) the Walmart drop forget about it. Bots only and “oh deer” error messages

They've already done it three times so far this year in the exceptionally limited genre of gaming (Xbox, PS5, Nvidia 3080)... that they'd expand into other territories is hardly a surprise.

Scalpers, despite being the perfect capitalists, are assholes.

Best Buy had a good thing with the AMD Zen 3 launch- you had to click a button, then wait a while before you could check out as part of a batch. It gave humans a buffer of time to load the store page and get ready to purchase.

But the only true solution to scalping is to meet demand with supply.

I've been wondering of a hybrid solution to "meet demand with supply". Couldn't you just take the order and say you'll get the ship date after purchase?

B&H tried this and ended up with a 3 month shipping delay- unacceptable in the fast-moving tech market. Users canceled their orders once they managed to get an order at another retailer.

This is what Lenovo does. I ordered my AMD T14 on Nov. 3, most estimate has it shipping Jan 17. Original estimate when I ordered was Dec 10.

Anyone have a favorite cook group or bot they recommend?

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