Who’s running the Vincere bot network on Instagram?
medium.com
medium.com
There's a widget that pops up periodically that says "Someone in {city}, {country} purchased {product}". It looked a bit fishy, so I poked around the source code.
Sure enough, the faked purchases are in the source code. They don't even bother to load them via XHR to at least give some semblance of legitimacy. Lol.
s = [{ "sn_city": "Pompano Beach", "sn_country": "United States", "sn_discount": null, "sn_first_name": "Erick", "sn_handle": "natu-t-shirt", "sn_img": "https:\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0283\/5824\/6448\/products\/product-image-1183227221.jpg?v=1600916205", ...
From: https://sales-notification-cdn.makeprosimp.com/v1/published/...
"1 other person looked for your dates in the last 10 minutes"
Booking.com is the worst.
I thought this logic was usually done in the backend and can't be viewed from the front? E.g. right click > view source in Chrome only shows HTML and some frontend JS doesn't it?
Normally, yeah, you wouldn't see individual purchase data in front-end code...that would be backend code returning just json/xml/whatever that the browser would consume.
That it's hardcoded in the client is why it's funny and obviously fake data.
Since they are almost always on dubious looking ecommerce sites, or scammy betting or crypto web applications
I always assume these to be fake. Anywhere
Shopify's business model encourages people to build dropshipping sites, there are literally hundreds of thousands of them. They promote plugins like Oberlo[1] that let you import products directly from AliExpress into your store to markup and dropship. They have blog posts[2] that teach you how to dropship. I feel like the author is implying that dropshipping is a scam, well if you are foolish enough to pay markup on items that you could order yourself directly from AliExpress that's your own problem.
I think the bot issue is highlighting that these "scammers" have figured out a way to automate driving sales through influencer marketing. However, any dropshipper could do the same thing manually, and some likely are. Influencer marketing is basically sending influencers your products to promote, in this case they are asking them to purchase, but they are still getting real products. Is that a scam?
How do you expect the average consumer to automatically know if a product they’re looking at is being resold from AliExpress?
I think that's probably a good question most of the time. On this site (vincerewears.com), though, it's pretty obvious.
First, the t-shirt is priced at $99, with no notion of brand or why you might pay $100 for a t-shirt. Next, it has this warning on the product page: "CLOTHING ARE ASIAN SIZE. KINDLY CHOOSE 1-2 SIZE BIGGER FROM YOUR US MEASUREMENT."
And this on shipping policy: "In regards to shipping, we are still offering free worldwide shipping to nearly all countries, however there will be delays. Our usual delivery time is 15-40 business days, however please allow up to 60 business days for delivery."
So, 60 business days is, ugh 12 weeks? 3 months? Heh.
Which is one of the MANY reasons I mostly use "Austria, Europe" in conversations nowadays.
But we had letter sized priority shipments to the US that took 3 months, on average about 3-5 weeks at times!! Shipments from the US that took about as long too.
No idea what happened in the beginning with Corona. But from my POV it seems the postal system is broken over there.
Didn't help that people bought more and more online and would order inter-continentally if they had to (I know I did!).
Does that really explain why the US is still having these problems? My guess is that the system is overwhelmed either way. Flights from and to China also were massively less, yet the worst delay we had with china was like 1 week. And today it is on average a week less than before Corona, because most postal systems were actually able to grow and better themselfs in that time.
This particular site (vincerewears.com) has guidance that usual shipping times are 15 to 40 business days, but to expect 60 business days (3 months).
Google Lens/image Search on an image or screenshot is often pretty good for this. Whether that's reasonable for the average consumer I don't know.
The scam in this article seems to be the bots that try to trick would be Instagram influencers into buying merchandise to sell to their audience. As I understand it the bots are really just trying to convince the influencers into buying the goods themselves and the influencers don't get any cut of whatever product they do sell.
It's not necessarily foolish, they're providing market-knowledge arbitrage which has value. If the reseller made me aware of the product in the first place and I'm willing to their price then the premium was the price I paid to not have to discover the product on my own, and to not have to bother with price comparison shopping.
I know $15 is an agreeable price and I can buy it right here right now instead of spending 30 minutes comparing vendors to find that I could save $5 on AliExpress, or just never having it at all because I didn't know about the product.
I'd pay to not hear that phrase ever again. That's not value, that's nonsense.
The negative externalities come from the fact that very few people will buy random unbranded $99 T-shirts on a whim, meaning they need to spam a million people to find the one or two buyers in the haystack.
Ex. Clothing sizing is a big issue there. Or real CE signs. If I have to compare 20 products myself and only add the good one to my store I definitely added some value for customers
Also as said somewhere else local customer protection laws apply to dropship stores, but not AliExpress
Clearify:/ I don't dropship. But I know the game
That's explicitly brought up in the article:
>> These schemes are very easy to set up. Shopify has a number of helpful tutorials on how to do it. [these were inline links] And the margins on them can be quite significant if the customer doesn’t realize the brand is just a front. For example here’s a shirt Vincere is currently selling for $99, here’s the same shirt on AliExpress for $16. That’s a markup of 500%.
> I think the bot issue is highlighting that these "scammers" have figured out a way to automate driving sales through influencer marketing. However, any dropshipper could do the same thing manually, and some likely are. Influencer marketing is basically sending influencers your products to promote, in this case they are asking them to purchase, but they are still getting real products. Is that a scam?
Also brought up in the article:
>> Then on top of that if by chance someone does use your ambassador code to buy something, most of these brands do not have any affiliate marketing infrastructure… so they pocket your promised commission too.
EDIT: Also, later in the article, she discusses the second layer of scamming here, which is botnet operators scamming the dropship scammers.
You do get charged. The drop shipper just charges a lot more for the same item that you could order on Amazon for less.
Just like Wish Amazon is far from direct.
Edit:// because people always seem to think Amazon automatically has good pricing. Things that don't sell so often and are amazon warehoused have a recurring cost for the seller. Who do you think is paying that? Some categories still have a 300% or more markup on Amazon.
However sorry if this somehow was not polite.
While otherwise true, I hate to say it but this point misses something.
There is definitely a value-add in marketing something to someone who wants it. There are tons of products (especially fashion) that people might be interested in but don't know exist. This is the most benevolent thesis of the entire marketing field. As scummy as marketing can be, there is definitely some value in curating a basket of stuff and generating a commission on the sales lead.
What the markup is, of course, can really color the palette, but I don't see anything inherently wrong with marketing. This whole scenario is a lot more on the astroturf side of the scale, but social media is a lot of astroturf in some respects.
Or do you buy your electronics directly in china?
if you are foolish enough to not spend lots of time on entrepreneurship/startup blogs to know all about drop shipping then shame on you dummy!
However dropshipping has positives for the customer. Within Europe they suddenly are protected with our customer protection laws which they wouldn't buying from Asia. They can just return and get their money back. Or be certain that a broken item could be returned.
Same reason people buy their phones locally with a huge markup instead of buying the 2sim version directly in Asia for 100$ less.
That said most dropshipping goes far above a fair markup these days
A lot of people hate on dropshippers because they markup prices and take months to ship a product from China. BAD dropshippers do this. A good dropshipper will find demand for a product and bring it to where the customer likes to go and make sure shipping is short by choosing US suppliers (for US customers).
In reality, when you go to Target, you are also buying things at a markup. Why buy something for $10 when you can find it online for $7? Because it's fucking insane to expect people to constantly do pricing and quality research to save a few bucks.
I feel like the next innovation in dropshipping will be when places like Oberlo and Spocket make it easier for dropshippers to do quality control. They already make it easy to find products with fast shipping times.
“Anyone who is trying to hawk 99 dollar t-shirts is a scammer by definition.”
Is this just some kind of money laundering engagement?
Just food for thought.
It sounds to me like they are over edges MLM companies are careful not to cross. I.e. they probably don't know if they could legally pay the "influencer" they are chatting with an affiliate fee.