My boyfriend keeps trying to buy a PS5 digital off walmart online and he was ready on the page with credit card info all set and as soon as the restock time hit, it was instantly out of stock (for the second time). How is this even possible? There’s no way that many people can add to cart, enter payment, and checkout in a single second.
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Because there are a lot of people that have these bots that do it all in one second. It’s such a scum bag move but these people are doing it and it sucks for all of us wanting only one
People really pay for robots to place an order as soon as it comes up. The same goes for any desirable object, like Supreme, Gucci, hell, Lego even. It’s just the PS5 is HEAVILY sought after right now
It’s because of a thing called bots, which are really just small & very specific applications designed to repeat the same steps over and over again to acquire these items when sold online. So while a regular human may take several minutes to go to a website, find the item they want to buy, add it to a cart, go to enter their billing information, and complete the purchase, these bots can perform the same steps in seconds or fractions of a second.
Most online retailers actually adjust stock based on shopping carts, not sales. It’s bad practice letting someone get to checkout only to take away the item as they fill in their credit card information. As soon as everyone has clicked add to cart, those ps5/xbsx/rtx3080s aren’t available. That makes the stock disappear very quickly.
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Bots
But also any good site will reserve your item for a certain amount of time when it gets placed in your shopping cart to prevent you from checking out and then being told there’s no stock. So even without bots the stock would go extremely fast.
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