UK politicians call for the resale of goods bought by “bots” to be illegal | Hacker News Reader

UK politicians call for the resale of goods bought by “bots” to be illegal

pcgamer.com

23 pointsbananapear12 comments

I don't think that a legislative approach would work. Prices always rise when demand is high and supply is low, and this is just one way that happens. There's nothing "right" about the MSRP, that's just a guess by the manufacturer about what the market will bear. With the prices high, valued goods will go to those most willing to pay the high prices first. Those of us with more sense will simply wait until after Christmas.

The issue is bots create artificial scarcity, it’s not uncommon for concerts to have large numbers of empty seats while being sold out. Scalpers are trying to maximize personal profit which can mean significant unsold inventory.

If nothing else eBay resellers are adding however long the auction takes + the product being shipped a second time which is a net loss for customers.

Scalping could be pretty easily prevented if ticket sales had to be ID'd at the time of purchase. No way to change the name on the ticket unless it's sold back to the venue at the price it was paid.

But then it goes back into the pool of available tickets that anyone can buy...

This feels ill thought through and likely to cause unintended side effects.

There's no strong reason why we don't all get our purchases done my machine, it could be much handier if we said "Alexa buy item X from shop Y with such and such condition" (it needn't be Alexa of course).

What does this do to the MSRP by giving it special status? How is competition affected?

What if people genuinely don't want an item they bought for reasons that aren't initially apparent?

Where does buying by machine stop and start? Is the browser part of a machine?

For me the most compelling concern though is that it conflates a proxy for abuse with an abuse - why not simply target the abuse and let reasonable people who have some unstated reason to buy using a machine carry on unimpeded.

There are also trivially easy ways that companies could reduce abuse. You would allocate people a ticket at random perhaps giving no more than one ticket to each pre-registered payment method and then hold a lottery so only certain ones would proceed - then it's no longer about crazy fast reflexes of a machine it's about chance and all participants get an equal chance without needing to resort to legislation.

This seems like a pretty typical political response to cyber problems. Props to the MPs that saw a problem here but their unfamiliarity with the problem domain has lead to a pretty shoddy bill.

I agree that price gouging is a problem and that mass-purchasing for that reason is an issue. There are better solutions though, surely.

Another solution that comes to mind is to remove the ability to resell newly released items within a period after their initial release.

The first few weeks after initially going on sale is the time where an item is still highly coveted and the manufacturer doesn't have the capacity to create more. In that same window, bulk-purchasers cannot often afford to sit on the item for weeks on end.

If they made it illegal to - for example - resell an item fro more than 10% higher than the retail price within the first 3 months, most price gougers wouldn't be able to afford it.

You could also impose a limit on the number of items a person can buy by law - similar t some shops do to try to stymie selling out of highly coveted items.

They could impose a maximum of 3 purchases per person. Then shops and payment processors would have to enforce this rule.

I wonder how they'll feel about amazon's use of bots to scrape the internet for other retailers using the same UPC codes registered to sellers items on amazon. Amazon penalizes sellers who offer their amazon items for less on other online retailers.

Also, UPC codes are entirely controlled by a single company called GS1, start at $25 each. It's also worth noting that GS1 has been compromised multiple times, allowing overseas hackers to list "copycat" products with cloned UPC's defrauding legitimate sellers. Ironically, invalidating the whole reason UPC codes were invented in the first place.

>Amazon penalizes sellers who offer their amazon items for less on other online retailers.

How so? I'd be interested to learn more about this. Can you share some sources?

Sure, thing. It's hard to find info about this because most info about listing things on Amazon is hidden behind hoards of information from course sellers and "get rich quick with amazon FBA" content.

Essentially, Amazon either wants you to A) register a trademark and your brand (the only way to list things without UPC's and use amazon's internal "fxn" label scheme) or purchase UPC's for each product you sell. UPC's are intended to be the same for your product wherever it ends up on the web and are intended to uniquely identify your products. Technically you could purchase a new UPC for each place you list your items, but that can get expensive. Amazon leverages UPC's to identify items in their warehouses and more importantly trace counterfeit items or food items that could require a recall. It used to be common for people to re-sell existing UPC's but recently amazon has started banning sellers for this practice. Having expensive UPC's is also a way to make the barrier to entry higher, making sellers on Amazon really have to want to sell on amazon.

The game theory and psychology of it all is pretty interesting.

The issue is that the company who's making the coveted product is in an excellent position with the hype that's generated by product literally flying off the shelves.

It's like a nightclub. They could let in everyone but they would rather have a queue outside because scarcity generates hype.

There's a product seemingly every holiday season that is THE hype product, whether it's Furbies, the Wii or the graphics card du jour. Let the market handle it in this instance.

Now, make it the same for stock market.

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