Leveling the odds

[RDalman]

I hear some are using this to help with checking out in the webstore quickly. I had been wondering how the knives sell in less than a min because I wouldnt be able to do that manually myself even for one knife.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bigcartel-atc-bot/aklogofbfcoelfakmhhbfdnajdeofagf

 

[Michi]

You could accumulate orders for, say, five minutes (or whatever amount of time you prefer) after something goes on sale. Then, at the end of that time, if you have more orders than items, randomly select the orders you can fill. Send an email to the successful and unsuccessful buyers, and charge credit cards accordingly.

Waiting more than five minutes or so might not be such a bad idea, depending on whether you want to cater to people in different times zones in the US or overseas. Personally, I really dislike sales where the only way to have a chance at a ticket is to to place the order in the first few seconds. It either means sitting at the computer at 3 am local time to hit the button at the right moment, to (maybe) get a ticket, or sitting down and writing a bot, which clearly disadvantages the majority of buyers because they lack the programming skills (or determination).

 

[RDalman]

Thanks but I don't think I can do it that way in my webstore system. I think every order has to be paid in order for it to go through.

 

[Michi]

I understand. In that case, there probably next to nothing you can do to stop a bot. To the server (apart from the timing of the request), a bot looks exactly the same as a human being.

 

[Luftmensch]

I suppose it depends on capabilities of the e-commerce software?

Theoretically you could introduce some friction between a product and final purchase to inhibit bots. For instance: requiring a customer to validate a captcha system before the payment gateway is exposed. Depending on the sophistication of the bots and the captcha, this would separate human in front of their screens from webcrawlers...

Whether not this is offered by e-commerce software - couldnt tell you!

 

[Barashka]

I don't think orders placed in the last shop update where bots ... I was there on the dot, filled out the info in sub 30 seconds and was ready to buy .. but alas my credit card didn't like me buying expensive stuff in a different continent. The Instagram posts about pending updates days in advance really helped, thank you.

The suggestion about waiting 5 minutes is something that Bloodroot blades do with their monthly sales, though I think they do it manually so I have no idea how the payment would work.

Considering you probably have hundreds of people trying to buy a handful of knives, there is bound to be competition. Some kind of random selection might help, but that's usually quite a bit manual work, or web engineering voodoo ... and I'd much rather you spend time making knives then figuring out most fair sales strategy

edit: I feel like above didn't quite say what I meant, or read a bit too negative. So edit .. I'd appreciate some kind of system of organization, a queue, a buy-offer-random selection / possibly more bot prevention (if that is really a problem) .. though I still think whatever the solution is, the ration of demand-to-supply is so drastic, most people will be left hanging anyway.

 

[Luftmensch]

The Instagram posts about pending updates days in advance really helped, thank you.

Definitely... there are some social media fiends out there.

Considering you probably have hundreds of people trying to buy a handful of knives, there is bound to be competition. Some kind of random selection might help, but that's usually quite a bit manual work, or web engineering voodoo ... and I'd much rather you spend time making knives then figuring out most fair sales strategy

Random selection would be easy 'voodoo' to implement for a developer - it wouldn't require any manual work. But to be done manually would be tedious!



@RDalman - just to be clear on your intentions in this thread... I think you mentioned the bot out of frustration and curiosity? Or were you seeking a fairer mechanism for sales?

 

[RDalman]

Yea a bit fairer. Don't know how much bot usage there is, just found out about it and wanted to share. The webstore system I use is primarily because it's super simple for me to use. I'm not competent for "developer voodoo" and indeed prefer to just make the knives. And yea it's bound to be like this with small supply, so just a small something I could do easily. Will stick with the heads up for sales (but I'm going to just now post one that got cancelled now)

 

[dan]

That K-tip is a beaut, I'm sure someone will love it. If I could afford it right now I'd be all over it.

Regarding the original question, I think it's tough to combat the bots with a pre-built shop solution. I think the 'Captcha' idea posted by Luftmensch is a good idea.

As far as I understand bots usually work by recognizing the data entry fields ("Address", "Name", "Payment Information", etc.) by an identifier written into the coding of the store page. The simplest way to beat the bot is to rename the identifiers and hope the bots aren't savvy enough to recognize the fields anyways. However, it's unlikely BigCartel allows you that level of code access to change the code-level identifiers. Other big e-store solutions (e.g. Shopify) have the same problem with bots, too, for the same reason.

 

[PC315]

Btw I was thinking about this and realized that captcha is the proper and easy solution to stopping bots. Google for example offers this library
https://www.google.com/recaptcha/intro/v3.html

I *think* it's free to use, but not sure of EU policy on data and privacy and how that applies here.