Amazon creating a system to try and stop scalpers from buying up large quantities of high demand products.

[GhostRoadieBL]

Amazon has a ton of issues to work out before they start trying to tackle scalping, don't get me wrong it's definitely high on the list but they really should be tackling fake listings or just add a "report seller" option and let the customers filter their site.

That's the most obvious way to shut down both fake listings and scalpers reselling items. Just "report seller - reason - price outside market norms, or vastly above msrp etc"

 

you can bet there's even an automated method for identification of products through keyword searching the posting and referencing other products prices with similar keywords, it seems too simple to block over pricing items.

 

The purchasing scalpers are then easy to circumvent with signing up for a notification for the option to buy, you can even add a gamer testing question like "what colour is sonic" so it blocks out bots and people unwilling to google an obvious answer.

[Stahlmann]

On 6/2/2022 at 10:49 PM, Origami Cactus said:

Would be cool, but Amazon scalps themselves too, so wouldn’t change much.

If you ARE the retailer, you cannot be a scalper. These are two different things. Amazon's prices just went up like it did on every other retailer.

Scalpers are opportunists that are only interested in a product because of short-term profits that can be had.

Amazon has been an electronics retailer for years and will be one in the future.

[Stahlmann]

Curious how fast their anti-bot measures can be countered by bots. Captchas or even personal identification combined with limited quantities per user didn't stop the GPU scalpers from doing their thing.

[Kisai]

1 hour ago, Stahlmann said:

Curious how fast their anti-bot measures can be countered by bots. Captchas or even personal identification combined with limited quantities per user didn't stop the GPU scalpers from doing their thing.

Because you're up against humans, not bots, in reality. If 1000 people want an item and 100 items are available, having bots is like having 100 people, per person, trying to buy all the lottery tickets, despite the fact that your odds of winning are exactly the same as winning one. You don't win 100 jackpots, only one. 

 

More or less, the purpose of the bots is "volume stuffing", making it so that the service is so busy that nobody else operating at human speed can order. If you have unlimited preorders, and the ability to produce unlimited supply (within reasonable expectations) then no scalping is possible. If you want to ensure people aren't just scalping for profit, you can even go further by analyzing the shipping and billing addresses and canceling preorders where multiple products are being delivered to the same building/office-park.

 

The people running the bots, have been running bots for well over 15 years doing this on ebay scalping, doing this with mmorpg's gold selling, and doing this with twitch viewbots, and so forth. They have a lot of experience with anti-bot countermeasures, and like I said earlier in the thread.

 

The best solution was to just take preorders. Apple has never had a problem with their preorders for a hot item. Kickstarter's have usually not had any problems with people who order, getting their item. People just have problems with kickstarters over-promising, and shifting timelines because they are not just-in-time production lines. If someone does a kickstarter right, they would have a quote from their factory, long before anyone even knows the product is being produced. So they setup several mile stores, which correlate with quotes/discounts they got from their factory.

 

Pre-ordering works, but it only works if you have a trusted logistics chain.

 

[Arika]

On 6/6/2022 at 2:16 AM, BuckGup said:

A scalper would not exist if people were not paying the prices they ask.

But I have to have next product!

[suicidalfranco]

18 hours ago, Arika S said:

But I have to have next product!

CONSUUUUUUUUUUUME