I have a lot of updates on the Yeezy drop, but I will start with the high level:
Shopify Anti-bot (Livestock, KITH etc)
Between the 10 stores I listed last night, there was nearly 5,000 pairs that went online for those sites. Not one single bot worked on Shopify today if the store had anti-bot. This is why I emphasized how important it would be to use these sites over everyone else.
Footsites (Footlocker, Eastbay, Finishline etc)
Bots absolutely destroyed Footsites today. Footlocker was letting less than 0.5% of people purchase at a time to try and improve the site. That was a massive fail. Because bots did not work on Shopify, they went extra hard on Footsites and it was fuckin ugly.
Adidas app
With the bulk of stock (100k in the US, 4K in CA) on the adidas apps in North America, this was one of the best options for this drop. adidas not doing it on web was a blessing because their system sucks so an easy raffle entry was much better than the alternative. I just wish they ended the raffle yesterday so you knew if you won or not, and could have slept in through this 7AM EST start time.
\YeezySupply
Same thing here as Footsites, they got destroyed by bots. One of the biggest sneaker tragedies of 2019 is adidas moving Yeezy Supply from shopify over to their piece of shit system, all because they didnt want to train their staff on Shopify.
OVERALL
While frustrating what happened at Footsites and YS, this was expected and will be the norm with them until they fix their shit. I’m overall 9/10 happy with how Shopify went today. I couldn’t imagine owning a $4,000 bot and then it being useless.
Following up on today’s Shopify changes. Here’s a breakdown of what happened:
- Right now a few stores have access to the question feature, this is not a main feature to anti-bot but it definitely helps. Livestock was the only one to use it today and it was awesome. More stores will have it soon and it will get better.
- The changes made to stop bots on Shopify are still not clear to me which is why I recommend everyone go about adding product to cart manually and only use monitors to find the product link.
- Something with it went a bit wonky at 8AM EST for UNDFTD and banned manual users, myself included. If you got payment error for technical reasons at 8AM EST or prior, then that is why — the system thought you were a bot which is a fail.
- I believe that issue was resolved for 10AM EST releases on KITH, DTLR and co. If you tried on a 10AM EST drop and got payment technical error, ShopPay loop or issues with Apple/Google Pay please let me know in the thread.
This is day 1 of a new battle against bots that I believe we will have the advantage of for awhile on Shopify releases. Basically everything in our shopify guides on how to check out is now invalid and expired. I have to start from scratch with our documentation to ensure its timely with whats going on.
Basically the good news is being more human helps you and our job will be how to provide you the edge needed to succeed – part of that is the monitors finding products for you instantly. Regardless, I will be diligent and on top of every detail going forward.
It will be very important that you read everything in #announcements before a release to ensure you’re up to date.I will have more on this come Sunday night or early Monday morning before KITH’s Team USA Monday program release.
For now, I leave you with a screenshot of Cyber users complaining about their multi-thousand dollar bot not working.
