Sneaker collectors: The technical skills needed to be a reseller

Sneaker collecting has been a popular hobby amongst sports enthusiasts for many decades. However, the real explosion of the sneaker game can be pinpointed to when Air Jordan 1s took the world by storm. Everyone wanted to be like Mike and that interest in sports footwear has started a new era for Nike and other sneaker companies.

Once getting a signature shoe became the badge of honour, many iterations of limited-edition footwear drove the sneakerheads crazy. An ever-growing interest in professional sports has created a unique market where knowledgeable resellers help others find the rarest sneakers at inflated prices. However, due to fluctuations in possible releases and unpredictability in the popularity of sneakers, even the smartest sneakerheads have struggled to turn their favourite hobby into a sustainable income. While some have managed to use accumulated knowledge to grow their influence in sports-related industries, others have utilised the best limited-edition sneakers as great, yet scarce, occasions to earn an extra buck. However, everything changed with a new era of sneaker copping.

The modern sneaker reselling industry went in a new direction in the late 2000s, due to the mainstream introduction of the Internet. Sportswear companies slowly started implementing limited-edition drops into online shops, and anyone with a great collection of footwear could reach an interested client base with ease.

New opportunities have attracted many new players into the market, but tracking the upcoming sneaker drops no longer guarantees a successful cop. Today, one has to be a tech-savvy client with unique tools to secure a single pair, let alone multiple sneakers. Here is an idea of the benefits of a “SNKRS” bot, virtual private servers (VPS), and residential proxies. Smartproxy is a great proxy provider with many guides on how to choose an intermediary server to pair with these tremendous tools. Here are the technical skills and software used by modern sneaker resellers.

Living and dying by the bots

Today, the whole sneaker copping and reselling market stands on algorithmic automation. A SNKRS bot or – even better – multiple bots are necessary to have a chance at buying limited-edition footwear. Speeding up online checkout requests with bots is the only way to accelerate the process and have a chance at beating other resellers, as well as casual customers.

A modern sneaker reseller has to have enough technical knowledge to tweak the activity of the bot to make it less recognisable and assimilate it with human traffic. Overeager bots send too many requests and website rate-limiting can help identify and block them, so it’s important to make automation efficient but unidentifiable.

Once a SNKRS bot starts showing results it’s time to crank up the numbers! Running concurrent bots increases the scale of a copping operation, as well as its success rate. However, multiple rapid connections from the same IP address is an easy way to get banned. Thankfully, there are tools to protect these automated operations.

Cranking it up with residential proxies

Proficient proxy server use is what separates the men from the boys in the sneaker reselling business. If a buyer never exposes their real network identity to the website, they can run more than one SNKRS bot and push them to incredible efficiency. Residential proxies rarely get banned because they come from real Internet service providers. Serious resellers rent these middlemen servers from business-oriented proxy providers and end up with the most copped sneakers in the drop.

Residential proxies give enough breathing room for resellers to constantly adjust their settings, without the fear of getting banned. If the system is over-tuned, a banned IP will be replaced with another address from a large proxy pool.

Using virtual private servers

With more than one SNKRS bot automating checkouts, there’s not much more that can be done to increase the chances of success. However, for those who are still unsatisfied, the next step that will make a difference depends on location and hardware. For collectors and sellers with consistent clients and a steady flow of limited edition sneakers, it is time to upgrade the system.

Virtual private servers (VPS) are located in specific locations to complement the client’s desires. For sneaker copping, a good VPS has to be physically located near the sneaker websites. A small ping latency to these pages is necessary for extremely fast checkout, and superb, high-speed Internet helps make purchases go through with ease. It’s worth choosing a VPS with preferred specifications to support automated copping, and using every SNKRS bot with a residential proxy to stay ahead of the competition.

The modern sneaker business is dominated by geeks. Because of that, a casual customer has no chance of getting hold of their favourite sneakers and has to settle for overpriced footwear from resellers. To stay ahead of the game, any sneakerheads worth their salt will learn the necessary technical skills to have a chance at getting a pair or even starting a reselling career.

The editorial unit