Story at a glance
- More consumers are using bots this year as shopping becomes more difficult and increasingly expensive.
- Bots can come at a significant cost to users, and only a few of them have been released by bot makers.
- Some retailers have upped their bot defense this year in response to growing popularity.
Unless you’re able to check out your online shopping cart in less than a few hundred milliseconds, you could lose out on hot-ticket items this holiday season.
Shopping bots, already popular among sneaker buyers competing to snag limited-edition shoes, are now gaining traction by average consumers in a market plagued by a supply chain crisis that’s made purchasing even everyday items more difficult and more expensive.
Bots scan thousands of web pages globally to alert users to the best deals for desired items within seconds. Advanced shopping bots can be programmed to purchase items automatically at their lowest price, and, depending on the bot, can take less than 200 milliseconds — faster than the blink of an eye.
This year, because of bottlenecks in global supply chains tied to the pandemic and worker and equipment shortages, stores appear to be running out of everything. When something in short-supply gets restocked online, that’s where shopping bots can help.
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“People will try to jump the line and leverage automation to grab anything that has a limited inventory,” Patrick Sullivan, chief technology officer for security strategy at the cybersecurity firm Akamai Technologies, told Bloomberg last month. “It used to be concert tickets, then purses and tennis shoes, and now it’s vaccine reservations and even more mundane things.”
But shopping bots come at a significant cost to users, with some shoppers paying nearly $100 a month for bot services that scour sites like Amazon and Walmart, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Bot makers only release a limited number of these applications, making them, somewhat expensive — ironically — because of their short supply (and now, high demand). Once sold out, bots can resell for thousands of dollars, according to Insider.
“As bots have successfully grabbed merchandise, some customers have taken an ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’ approach, buying into bot services,” the market consultant group Forrester said in a report this month. “This tactic helps to fund the bots’ work and makes it ever more likely that bots will go after desirable merchandise, exacerbating the vicious cycle.”
Some retailers have raised their bot defenses this year in response to the software’s growing popularity, but those that have not will lose business and drive desperate consumers to more expensive resale websites, where they’ll likely purchase goods from the very bot operators that beat them to the products in the first place.
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