Not having any drops today was a bit weird :joy: but I guess after yesterdays madness this makes sense. Someone really needs to explain to me why adidas does 7AM EST drops on a weekday….
Anyways, figured this was a good time to highlight the discussion around stopping bots. Chris Gibbs of Union did an interview with Complex where they talk about the Union drop and what they did to stop bots. It’s a good article to read:
https://www.complex.com/sneakers/how-to-beat-sneaker-bots-union
On that end as well, you can listen to episode #22 of our podcast as we cover that release with our thoughts:
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/episode-22-unions-successful-drop-vs-bots/id1500062406?i=1000489696262
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5bkpELvUgUA4vDjrbaMCd0
Moral of the story: This is a battle bot developers are going to lose IMO.
ShoePalace was one of the most botted websites online and an absolute shit show. The fact anyone tweeted their links out is hilarious because not a single human purchased from them this year until they switched to shopify. People were selling bots for 5K+ and paying thousands in monthly fees to keep it running and now thats all worthless.
One of the bigger players in the bot world literally tweeted Sept. 9 he can’t handle another shopify anti-bot update.
https://twitter.com/unlucku_/status/1303860962064175104
I know there’s a LOL at the end of that but trust me, there is concern for many of them that their entire business could go down the toilet. It already happened with SNKRS bots and Shopify bots are next. Foot Locker bots are the one that I don’t see a solution in sight — other than just switching to Shopify.
Shopify has a market cap of over $120 Billion and now a full team dedicated to bot protection. One by one bots will start to drop like flies because they can’t keep up with new bot protection from Shopify.
It’s been a rocky year full of wins for humans and wins for bots. But I’m going to bet the multi billion dollar company is going to win. I’m looking forward to more stores implementing question and answer and also what Shopify has planned next.
