You can liken the sales of newly released limited edition sneakers to the sales of tickets to an Avengers movie premiere. There are only a limited number of tickets but so many people are dying to get their hands on a couple of them. There is barely enough to go round for one person so how do you even get more than one?

Majority of users automate the process of ticket purchases as it will increase your chances of purchase. This is because bots are faster than humans. And this is the same thing that happens in the world of sneakers.

When a new sneaker collection is up for release, interested buyers get ready to cop once the sales begin. Hundreds of thousands of others are also interested in this purchase but unfortunately, there are only a limited number of them available.

What's worse is that most sites allow only one purchase per person, so you can't get more than one for resale hence the need to use sneaker bots. A sneaker bot is a software that speeds up the checkout process as you make purchases online.

Sneaker bots are commonly used with servers to enhance their performance and speed.

So when making purchases from a limited number of products, bots are ideal for use. You will stand a better chance of making direct purchases from the sellers before they get to the retail market.

How Sneaker Bots Work

Before we begin, it's important to point out that when you use a sneaker bot, it doesn't guarantee that your purchase would be successful. This is because you are going against the target website, and also against other users who have automated their purchases too.

With a sneaker bot, you would need to provide some data. These include your name, credit card details, delivery address, and so on. You will also need to instruct the bot on the purchase to make.

One way to do this is to input the keyword or URL into the bot. Cook groups also help to provide you with the needed keywords and links.

After you provide the necessary information and set up the bot, it will automate the checkout process. So you will make purchases faster than if you did it manually (as fast as 0.2 secs). This speed is one of the reasons why captchas get triggered and once it comes up, your sneaker purchase may end.

The above explanation is the concise version of how sneaker bots work as it's not that simple in reality. You need to make various considerations when using sneaker bots to better your chances.

One of such is the use of sneaker proxies and a server. As stated earlier, servers improve the connection speed to the target site. Proxies are IP addresses that you use in place of your real one.

A proxy pool provides you with IP addresses you can alternate to avoid blocks as you try to make purchases. If you use just your real IP address with the bot, the website would detect your bot. This is due to the high number of requests that would be sent from the single IP address.

Your single IP would also be banned if you attempt to make multiple purchases as the website would recognize the entries as coming from a single source.

CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart. Humans can complete the tasks but bots find it difficult. That's why website owners use it to prevent bot use as much as possible.

Captchas appear while using a page, or before checkout to prevent any form of bot activity on the web page.

Recently, bots have become better at solving captchas. However, the delays caused will make your purchases more difficult. The delays could even cost you the purchase you are going for.

Captchas are mostly triggered when the number of requests from an IP address is more than the limit set by the site. It is generally triggered when suspicious activity is detected in your connection.

The user agent may still sell you out and trigger captchas. Sneaker bots trigger captchas commonly when you use a direct link to the checkout. It's expected that a normal user would begin from the home page and navigate to the checkout page, so when you go directly to the checkout page it gets suspicious.

Using Proxies to Avoid Captchas When Cooking Sneakers

The rate at which you get captchas depends on several factors such as your behavior on the site. A bot sends many requests to the target server, and it's not normal human behavior. So this will trigger a captcha or even get your IP banned.

With a proxy, however, you can send multiple requests spread over different IPs at a slow pace just as a human user would. It's less suspicious this way as every request won't be tied to a particular IP. So the site would think they are all coming from different users.

Change your bot settings and make it go slower than its default setting. Rotate IPs using a proxy rotator or use rotating proxies. Allow your bot to perform human actions on a web page such as mouse clicks and cursor movements.

The idea is to try to act as human as possible even if you are using a bot. So by following good practices for bot use, and using a proxy pool with a proxy rotator, you are less likely to encounter captchas.

Interesting Read : Data Extraction Using Web Scraping Proxies