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Scalper bots

Associate
Joined
15 Mar 2006
Posts
237
So it seems there are thousands of bots buying up stock and retailer websites arn't doing anything to protect against this.

An example was yesterday a some stock dropped on a competitor website I followed a link instantly but then had to queue behind 60,000 users (bots) by which time I got to the page all the stock had been bought.

Is it really so hard to protect against bots? Would it not be possible to do something to protect against this? Do retailers even care?
 
Soldato
Joined
5 Feb 2009
Posts
15,910
Location
N. Ireland
Do retailers even care?
Why would they? They’ll of course pay lip service to the issue making bold claims of how the genuine customer is more important to them. The reality however is that a sale is a sale. And of course the scalped bot pricing helps ‘hide’ the retailers own price scalping.
 
Associate
Joined
8 Mar 2010
Posts
98
It's sad but grimly predictable to see our beloved PC market now infected by the financial betting industry. I saw a site the other day which marketed itself as a financial investment company with 100% guaranteed return on investments ... was just a cash pile for bots to grab PC hardware and flog on eBay. As weldon855 said the only way to stop it is to ONLY buy from authorised retailers, but EVERYONE has to do this to make it painful for the scalpers. And unfortunately it seems people are still buying CPUs/GPUs off eBay. So.... gg.
 
Associate
Joined
2 Oct 2009
Posts
783
Isnt warranty from the retailer non transferable?
If so selling to bots removes responsibility for returns to retailer and puts it solely on the manufacturer.
 
Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
5,148
Location
Riding my bike
As weldon855 said the only way to stop it is to ONLY buy from authorised retailers, but EVERYONE has to do this to make it painful for the scalpers. And unfortunately it seems people are still buying CPUs/GPUs off eBay. So.... gg.

But then loads of retailers are inflating prices as well.....
 
Man of Honour
Joined
13 Oct 2006
Posts
90,817
The retailers don't care - or at least not that much - there are ways of doing it for a new product launch which much smaller companies I've worked for in the past have used for promotions and so on.
 
Associate
Joined
30 Mar 2007
Posts
1,546
Location
Leeds
Isnt warranty from the retailer non transferable?
If so selling to bots removes responsibility for returns to retailer and puts it solely on the manufacturer.

That's what makes me laugh about people buying from scalpers. No guarantee anyone is going to be there for them if their card is faulty, yet they don't think about that because they just have to have their new shiny toy.
 
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