Shopping bots help buyers snatch in-demand items before they sell out

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Originally published at: Shopping bots help buyers snatch in-demand items before they sell out | Boing Boing

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The people willing to pay those prices for bots aren’t parents looking to buy a popular toy for their kids for Xmas. They’re speculators, gougers, and obsessive collectors/hoarders.

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I’m rarely the accelerationist, but if a rampant speculators’ market can accelerate a public awareness of the commercial absurdity of gift-giving holidays, then go ahead, start building high speed fiber inches closer to amazon warehouses to get your packets there first. Given that the often deadly Black Friday stampedes didn’t really register as dangerous self-parody, I’m not holding my breath.

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Smells like… privilege.

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That’s exactly what I came to say. Nobody’s paying $99/mo for a shopping bot for personal use.

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Really disgusted that Boing Boing is promoting these things. This only benefits scalpers, not ordinary consumers.

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I am not a scalper, and yet tools like these have helped me acquire items before they were unavailable to me. I have been doing this for literally decades by using, for example, “sniping tools” on ebay to grab an item at a lower price than I might have had to otherwise in a bidding war, saving me money and preventing scalpers from extracting more money than they otherwise would have.

I am sorry if you find my attempts to use technology to pay less or obtain items I otherwise could not short of camping outside of stores or similar acts “disgusting” as well.

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So you’re in… favor of this.

Man, it’s tragic what’s happened to this site.

BoingMall forever, I guess.

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I think I’d spend 10 minutes googling up a few lines of Python before paying that kind of money, if I ever had the need.

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I get that this is where the arms race has led us, but it does feel pretty disappointing that the only way to get these things is by using scalping tools.

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FYI if a site detects bot activity associated with you, they’ll likely blacklist your account.

Be sure you want to burn those bridges before you find yourself stranded.

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Meanwhile, in India.

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99/mo doesn’t even come close to what some of these people pay in terms of time and money for high demand items. It’s an arms race and mom and dad don’t have time to invest in that game.

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