Those people who’ve been using sneaker bots for years will know exactly how lucrative the sneaker resale market is.  It’s rare to find a market where simple possession is almost a guarantee of a healthy profit.  It’s why people will spend a lot of time and effort preparing their ‘cook’, if you can grab a pile of the best hyped releases you’re certain to make a lot of money.

Of course, like most money making opportunities, there is some investment required up front.  The crucial factor here is to prepare properly and ensure you don’t cut corners.   The pro’s never do which is why they’re successful, whereas amateurs often try to save  money or time on different aspects which inevitably lead to failure.

It’s tempting to ignore the preparation steps you need to succeed especially if it involves paying out more money.  Yet in most cooks all these steps are essential to success, remove one and the whole thing fails.  You don’t get cop less sneakers – you’ll get none at all.   It reminds me of an associated money making area a friend of mine got into – buying and reselling tickets for British football matches.

He used to target tickets for several big English Premiership soccer teams who’s tickets were always sold out.  Therefore their easy to sell off at a profit if you can get hold of them.  One of the easiest ways in the 2019/2020 season in the UK  is using a site called StubHub, where you can both buy and sell tickets.  In fact it’s perfectly possible to make a decent profit without leaving the site! So he invested a not inconsiderable amount of cash in a Bot designed specifically for StubHub.

Which is the sort of thing the professionals do, however that’s when the ‘pro’ set up finished.  Instead of finding decent proxies to use with his shiny new Bot, he instead bought a proxy scraper to grab free proxies off the web.  This phase was designed to provide the ability to run multiple accounts whilst saving a few bucks on proxy costs.

Except it didn’t work, in fact using free proxies never works nowadays.  They problem is that all the IP addresses they use are all recorded on lots of different blacklists all over the web.   These lists are all used by nearly all e-commerce sites in order to block unwanted visitors and fraudulent transactions. In practice, it pretty much turns any automated software into an internet pariah.  His Bot flagged fraud and virus detectors wherever it went, simply because of the IP addresses it was using.

Nothing wrong with the software, yet sharing IP addresses with spammers and cyber criminals is not a recipe for success.  The exact same scenario happens with sneakers, where most of the big players like Supreme. Nike and Adidas analyse every incoming address.

So How Do You Choose the Best Proxies for Sneaker Bots ?

Most of the software which automates purchasing any sort of product online will support the use of proxies.  In fact if you find one that’ doesn’t then you should leave it well alone.  The proxies are absolutely key to defining different identities online, each IP address is a separate user.  Where these addresses are registered and their past history will largely determine how successful the Bot is.

In reality you’re not choosing specifically the best proxy for AIO bot or any other Bot, but rather the retailer it’s targeting.    So the best proxies for Supreme won’t necessarily be the best Adidas proxies.   Some companies are much stricter than others, yet the restrictions are slowly starting to converge across the sector which you can see on this site.

Here’s the current state of play on the major sneaker sites –

• Nike – Residential IP AddressesOnly
• Supreme – Residential IP Only
• Adidas – Residential IP Addresses Only
• Shopify (scheduled releases) – Datacenter IP /Residential IP
• Shopify (random releases) – Residential IP

As you can see many of the sites now need residential IP addresses to function correctly.   Which is why most decent shoe proxies will have these addresses.  Although the restrictions sometimes vary on the same site depending on the release,  anything really popular will usually end up requiring a residential address.   That’s not to say every datacentre IP address will be blocked automatically but they will be flagged as potentially from a proxy.  In reality you’re reducing your chances significantly of dropping any real numbers.

Remember they’re still other factors in play here, so for example you can’t share a couple of residential IP addresses with a dozen others all targeting the same sites.

Buy Sneaker Proxies with Residential IP Addresses ?

These are standard IP addresses which have been registered for ordinary home users.  They’re normally distributed by an Internet Service Provider (ISP) to their paying customers.   So at home your IP address supplied to you by your internet provider will be classified as a ‘residential IP address’.  If you want all your transactions to look like an ordinary home user, then it’s residential proxies you need.

That is a proxy that will use residential IP addresses to make all external connections.  This is what makes you look like an ordinary home user and removes the huge “probably a Proxy” flag from your transaction.  Unfortunately it’s  much harder (and more costly) to get access to these residential addresses, although you can read about some of the methods employed here.

Of course, quite a few companies have managed to get access to a decent supply of residential IP addresses.  However it’s important to choose carefully and try and develop a decent relationship with a trusted supplier.   There are some proxy services which use IP addresses obtained in dubious ways through malware and botnets.  These are normally low quality and risky to use anyway so their benefit is negligible.

Most of the big players in the sneaker market tend to use one supplier called Luminati.  They have created a huge network of residential IP addresses by offering free programs and applications in exchange for using home connections temporarily.   For example people can use a free VPN service called Hola in return for allowing Luminati to route traffic through their connection when it’s not busy.   The reason these IP addresses work so well is that they’re genuinely standard home connections.

They are expensive though and if you’re starting out creating a sneaker based business then you might need to look at other options.  Here’s two other options who provide access to excellent residential IP addresses –

RotatingProxies – check out their ATC (add to cart) proxies for addresses that are specially curated to work with all the big foot wear sites.  They offer an inexpensive trial for 48 hours which you can set up to coincide with a release to test properly.   You can use rotating proxies for sneakers as long as the IP addresses don’t switch during a transaction. Make sure you tell them which retailers you want to access so that they can customize your trial.

Storm Proxies – the problem with many proxy providers is that they are often no more than resellers.  Which means that they have little control on the addresses and how they’re used with other customers.  So your footsite proxies can change or be replaced at any moment, even during a release! Storm own all the hardware which their proxies (and IP addresses) are used so they have complete control.  One of the very first residential proxy providers and a decent support team.