SHOPIFY
The Shopify platform can be incredibly difficult to understand but in this guide we will try to explain how these drops work along with the different ways drops can happen. As discussed in (UNTITLED) we know that Shopify is a platform that many sites use. Many popular sneaker sites will use the Shopify platform to sell items, that means the drop procedure and checkout process is going to be identical for a wide range of sites. Most if not all US based Shopify sites will drop sneaker releases at 10am EST. As many sites will drop at this time it means, if you are botting you will want to run as many sites that are dropping as possible to increase your chances. Lets say Kith, ShopNiceKicks and ShoePalace are all dropping at 10am EST which they usually do. Its going to be nearly impossible for a manual user to attempt to purchase and be fast at it, on all 3 sites at the same time. This is why bots dominate the Shopify scene as they allow users to not only utilise the bots speed but also its ability to run multiple tasks on different sites at the same time. As a manual user we suggest you target one of the Shopify sites that is dropping and hope for the best. Below we will talk about how Shopify drops work.
HOW SHOPIFY DROPS WORK
There are many different ways Shopify drops will work but firstly we will talk about the basic principle. x site, lets say Kith, will announce a time when they are dropping x item which you can find in the DreamCook site list. You will not be able to find the product on the site before they drop it. At the arranged drop time they will load the product onto the site. As a manual user you will need to refresh the page find the item > select the item > select your desired size > click add to cart > click checkout > wait in queue > get past queue > add shipping information > add billing information > click pay now. Obviously this is a lot to do and you need to be incredibly quick. As a manual users there are some tricks you can do to help you but overall bots are much faster and better at Shopify so it can be incredibly difficult to consistently cop. Next we are going to breakdown the Shopify experience.
THE SHOPIFY EXPERIENCE
Shopify uses a FCFS system. That means whoever finds the product, selects their size, adds to cart and clicks checkout first will be the first one in the queue. The first one in the queue is the first one to get out the queue. Obviously bots are very fast at doing all the necessary steps to get into the queue fast but there are many countermeasures used by Shopify to stop bots. As a manual user it can be incredibly challenging to get into the queue fast enough to even have a chance. Shopify drops will only last a few seconds as its a FCFS until it goes out of stock. As Shopify are constantly trying to stop bots they have developed different types of ways to do so and we will talk about those next.
BOT PROTECTION
As Shopify constantly battles with botters they have developed new ways to stop or atleast hinder the insane domination of bots. There are 3 main ways they try to stop bots and they all play a big role in how you bot Shopify and also how the manual users checkout experience plays out.
CHECKPOINT CAPTCHA
A checkpoint captcha is simply a captcha you have to solve before getting into the Shopify queue. Shopify sites can choose to enable or disable this feature and its better known as "enabling / disabling bot protection" Bot protection as a whole is not just making users solve a checkpoint captcha it is other things that will decide what task mode you have to run for your bot. Although it doesn't make a big difference for the manual user it is certainly something you will want to understand. Most sites that drop high demand sneakers or items will almost always enable BP. This means you will almost always have to solve a checkpoint captcha before you get into the queue. A checkpoint captcha is a type of Google ReCaptcha that you will have to solve, you will not be able to "one click" a checkpoint captcha.
Recently some Shopify sites such as Kith have implemented the use of HCaptcha as the checkpoint captcha over ReCaptcha.
It is essentially the same idea however HCaptcha will ask you a simple question, once you have input the answer you will need to click squares that match what they ask.
Similar to ReCaptcha however it does not require a good Gmail score as it is not linked to google in any way.
It will require a manual solve and can often be slow and tedious if your Gmail account is not in good condition. If a site enables this you will have to solve this captcha before you are able to get into the queue. So a common saying is, whoever can solve the checkpoint captcha fastest will get into the queue fastest meaning they are able to checkout before others. As we have discussed Shopify use a FCFS queue system, the first in the queue is the first out the queue and so on... meaning the faster you solve the checkpoint captcha the faster you can get into the queue.
Obviously you are up against thousands of others so you will want to make sure 1. Your Gmail account is in good condition so you don't get a long, slow checkpoint captcha and 2. You are experienced in captchas so you know what to click.
As a manual user there isn't a whole lot you need to know about this but as a botter it can require some preparation.
CHECKOUT CAPTCHA
Similarly to Checkpoint, Shopify sites can choose to enable or disable this. Checkout captchas will appear before you click Pay Now and you will need to solve this captcha before your able to purchase. This is where it gets a bit confusing. You are able to "one click" checkout captchas (if your Gmail is in good condition) when BP is not enabled. Meaning if a site has no BP (checkpoint) then you can one click the checkout captchas. If the site does have BP enabled then you will always have to solve it. We don't 100% know if a site will enable checkout captcha so we just have to go with the pattern of that site and see if they have used it in the past. Most of the time a site dropping in demand sneakers will use both checkpoint and checkout. As a botter that means you will need to open both checkpoint harvesters and checkout harvesters. We will talk about that more in the SETUP part of this guide.
PROXY PROTECTION
Another form of anti-bot is proxy protection. This is only enabled on some sites for some very in demand product drops. Its unknown weather a site will enable PP or not so again, we have to base it on history and patterns. Us botters have a general idea of weather a site will use PP or not which you will learn over time. General practice when botting Shopify sites is to imagine they will use PP, prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Proxy protection will only really effect botters as manual users will be using their home IP (local host) to browse and attempt to checkout on said site. Proxy protection will throttle certain proxies, this basically means they will slow them down so much to the point your tasks using throttled proxies will become useless / too slow to cop. This only happens to certain proxies which is why in the setup we recommend you use a mix of different types of proxies to avoid issues.
PP will only really effect DC and ISP proxies. Residentials and local host will go relatively unharmed. There are a few fresh ISP's that you can sometimes get your hands on which will not be throttled by PP for a short while but after some time, these ISP's will eventually get added to the blacklist and will be throttled next time around. This is why most proxy providers will say "NOT GAURANTEED ON SHOPIFY PP" on their ISP packages as their ISP's might work on PP if they are fresh but not all the time.
PASSWORD PAGE
Some sites adopt the use of a "password page". Although this isn't exactly an anti-bot measure it does stop botters from using the very effective PRELOAD task mode.
The password page is simply a page which has no information on it. The main website is blocked behind this page and you need the password to get through. Although its called the password page, for us botters the password has little relevancy. You don't need the password to this page, it is just used as a block before the drop time. At the scheduled drop time this password page will go and the main site will be accessible. Below is an image of DSM's password page. DSM is known to utilise the password page before all their major releases
As you can see its a pretty blank page, this page will drop at the drop time and you will then be able to purchase x product.
These 4 measures determine the task mode you should be using for each site. For example when a site uses a password page you should not use the PRELOAD mode because the task will not be able to add a random item to cart and cycle through the PRELOAD steps. Similarly if you are manual, you wont be able to do the queue bypass trick (which is basically the same system as PRELOAD mode for a bot) because there are no items you can use it on. This leads us onto your Shopify setup for both manual and botters.
SHOPIFY INFORMATION
Your Shopify setup is going to differ depending on what types of anti-bot your desired site is going to use. Now you may not know what type of anti-bot the site will use so before we start, below is a quick list of well known sites that commonly use the same anti-bot measures over and over again:
A FEW COMMON SITES THAT USE BP
KITH
UNDEFEATED
DSM NY + LONDON
CONCEPTS
SHOP NICE KICKS
SHOEPALACE
BDGASTORE
THE PREMIER STORE
SOCIAL STATUS
A MA MANIERE
APB STORE
DTLR
HAVENSHOP
DEADSTOCK CA
NOTRESHOP
ONEBLOCKDOWN
NOIRFONCE
A FEW COMMON SITES THAT SOMETIMES USE PP
KITH
CONCEPTS
SHOEPALACE
SHOP NICE KICKS
DSM
UNDEFEATED
A FEW COMMON SITES THAT USE A PASSWORD PAGE
DSM
ERICEMANUEL
Before we jump into the Shopify setup we need to understand why we do it this way. The following information is more pointed towards botters. Unlike most other sites, running a large amount of tasks is not needed for Shopify initial drops.
As we have learnt, Shopify uses a FCFS queue system as well as other measures such as checkpoint captchas. Lets imagine we are attempting to bot a site that uses BP so we will have to solve a checkpoint captcha. Each task will require you to solve a checkpoint captcha before you enter the queue. As you can only solve 1 or 2 captchas at a time as well as it taking anywhere between 3-10 seconds to solve a checkpoint captcha, running more than around 6-10 tasks is pointless unless you really know what your doing and your good at captcha solving. Remember each task will require a checkpoint captcha to be solved. Lets say your running 10 tasks, the item drops and all your tasks are waiting for a captcha to be solved.
You go to your harvesters and start solving. Lets say it takes you 5 seconds to solve a captcha; one of your 10 tasks is now in the queue waiting to get out the queue to checkout. You still have 9 captchas to solve and your already 5 seconds into the drop. Lets say you solve another captcha in 3 seconds. Your now 8 seconds into the drop and only 2 tasks have the potential to checkout.
Lets skip ahead and say you are 15 seconds into the drop and you have solved 3 more captchas. You are now 23 seconds into the drop and its likely that all the queue positions that have the ability to checkout are already taken up. But you only solved 6 captchas and you still have 4 more tasks to go. Those extra 4 tasks are useless as by the time you have solved the captcha for all those tasks the product is likely OOS. Remember there are hundreds if not thousands of people going for a drop with probably less than 500 pairs total. That means your up against everyone else so running more than around 6+ tasks is useless as by the time you have solved the 6th+ checkpoint, the position in the queue is too late.
This is why we recommend you keep your Shopify task count to a minimum especially if you are botting, sometimes its best to just run 1 or 2 tasks on your local host (no proxies) so its easy to manage your captchas and you can take advantage of your local host speed which we will talk about next.
Before we start with the setup we need to quickly touch on proxies and their uses for Shopify. As we know, many sites including Shopify will soft ban IP addresses that are sending too many requests at the same time. For example if your running more than around 3-4 tasks on Shopify on the same IP or on local host. That IP will get soft banned. This means you wont be able to use the site on the IP. That is why we use proxies, so each task can be a different IP so they don't soft ban you. However the bad thing about proxies is their speed and on a site that requires maximum speed such as Shopify, it can be a hinder to your success. As a proxy is just another step your router has to connect to before it can connect to the site, it slows the speed down drastically. Below is a quick illustration of what using proxies looks like compared to not using proxies.
LOCAL HOST to SITE SERVER = 100MS
LOCAL HOST to PROXY = 100MS + (PROXY to SITE SERVER = 200MS) = 300MS
Using a proxy is slower as it is just another step added to the request.
(speeds are not accurate, they just give you a general ideal)
Above is the general idea of proxies. Your local host has to connect to the proxy, then the proxy has to connect to the server which overall will take a considerably longer amount of time in comparison to not using a proxy. The request can just go straight to the site server instead of having to send it through a proxy first. But remember we cant send too many requests on the same IP or it'll get soft banned. The good thing about your local host IP address is it looks very legitimate, it doesn't look like an unwanted proxy connection to the site so they it wont get affected by proxy protection which is what we talked about earlier. It is a very good idea to always run 1-2 tasks on your local host. If your a beginner this is exactly what we suggest you do. For many reasons, unless you are advanced enough; you don't need to run extra tasks on proxies. Just 1 to 2 tasks on your local host can be a very effective way of botting Shopify. However if you are confident enough in your abilities it might be a good idea to run a few extra tasks using proxies to aid your success in copping multiple pairs, and that is where our recommended task setup comes in.
Quickly before we start we just need to remember a few things. We have so far learnt that sites such as Shopify require maximum speed. We know that just using your local host is the fastest way to bot Shopify so we will 100% be using a few local host tasks in our setup. But quickly touching up on proxies, we know that DC and ISP proxies are much faster than residential so it would be ideal to use those right? In most cases, wrong.
Remember we talked about proxy protection. DC and ISP proxies will often get throttled when PP is up, and sometimes even when just BP is up meaning we cant just rely on ISP or DC proxies for our task setups. You will want to aim to use a mix of proxies so if, lets say, your ISP tasks get throttled, you have a few tasks using your local host and residential proxies that will still work. As residential proxies look a-lot more like home IP addresses they don't get throttled as much.
PROFILES AND JIGGING
BOTTING SETUP
With all the information we have learnt about Shopify, this is our recommended setups. Split into two parts, a beginner botting setup and an advanced setup.
BEGINNER SETUP
Monitor Input: Variants > Links > Keywords
Task Mode: Refer to our Shopify task mode guide here
Task Count: 2 Tasks
Proxies: None (local host)
Delays: For PRELOAD tasks: Starting at 10,000ms 4 minutes before the scheduled drop time and even earlier if it is a hyped drop. Dropped to 2222-3333ms 5-10 seconds before the scheduled drop time. For SAFE/FAST tasks: 2222-3333ms
Harvesters: 1-2 Checkpoint Harvesters + 1 Checkout Harvester
Start Time: For PRELOAD tasks: 4 minutes before scheduled drop time For SAFE/FAST tasks: 10 seconds before scheduled drop time
Information: Once the product drops and the tasks ATC, you will be met with 2 checkpoint captchas. Be ready to solve these as fast as you can. Its sometimes best to open 2 checkpoint harvesters so you can immediately solve the 2nd checkpoint captcha immediately after you have solved the first, instead of having to wait for the 2nd one to load up on the same harvester. Once you have solved the checkpoint captchas your tasks will wait in queue.
Once out of the queue your tasks will attempt to checkout the item as long as its still in stock. This is when you might be met with 2 checkout captchas, be ready to solve those on your checkout harvesters as fast as possible.
EXAMPLE:
ADVANCED SETUP
Monitor Input: Variants > Links > Keywords
Task Mode: Refer to our Shopify task mode guide here
Task Count: 8 Tasks
Proxies: 2 Local Host Tasks + 3 Residential Tasks + 3 ISP Tasks (20% Local Host / 40% Residential / 40% ISP)
Delays: For PRELOAD tasks: Starting at 10,000ms 4 minutes before the scheduled drop time and even earlier if it is a hyped drop. Dropped to 2222-3333ms 5-10 seconds before the scheduled drop time. For SAFE/FAST tasks: 2222-3333ms
Harvesters: 2 Checkpoint Harvesters + 2 Checkout Harvesters
Start Time: For PRELOAD tasks: 4 minutes before scheduled drop time For SAFE/FAST tasks: 10 seconds before scheduled drop time
EXAMPLE:
ULTRA ADVANCED SETUP
Monitor Input: Variants > Link > Keywords
Task Mode: Refer to our Shopify task mode guide here
Task Count: 3 Tasks
Proxies: 1 Local Host Tasks + 2 ISP Tasks
Size Target: US7-9.5 Do not run Random, target just those sizes.
Delays: For PRELOAD tasks: Starting at 10,000ms 4 minutes before the scheduled drop time and even earlier if it is a hyped drop. Dropped to 450 - 950ms roughly 500ms - 1 second before the scheduled drop time. For SAFE/FAST tasks: 2222-3333ms when you start, 10 seconds before the drop. Then drop delays to 450 - 950ms roughly 500ms - 1 second before the scheduled drop time.
Harvesters: 3 Checkpoint Harvesters + 2 Checkout Harvesters
Start Time: For PRELOAD tasks: 4 minutes before scheduled drop time For SAFE/FAST tasks: 10 seconds before scheduled drop time
ULTRA ADVANCED SETUP INFORMATION
What we are doing here is attempting to pick up the product much faster, however this is a much risker method and can often result in getting rate limited so you need to ensure you do it correctly. If Shopify see that the same IP address has sent too many requests within a short amount of time, they will rate limit [429] that IP address thus making it impossible to checkout. What we are doing here is keeping delays super high up untill the very last half second - second, then we drop delays to something extremely low. During that very small time frame between dropping your delays and stock actually loading, your tasks will be spamming requests trying to pick up the product however because of how short this time frame is, it is not enough time for Shopify to realise that what you are doing is not human like and thus rate limit you.
If you keep your delays that low for more than roughly 3 seconds, you will get rate limited so its very important you only drop your delays as close to the scheduled drop time as possible. This is only necessary for extremely hyped up drops where you want to get a couple hundred millisecond head start over everyone else. However your competition could very easily make up the time they lost by solving the checkpoint captcha faster than you. Therefore its very important you combine this fast pickup method with a super fast captcha solve. This means you need to be using high quality ISP's and well farmed gmails so you get fast, 1 solve checkpoint captchas.
For this method we recommend you keep it very simply with only a few tasks. It's vital that you utilise your local host for this method but running just 1 task has its benefits and its draw backs. As this method is sending a-lot more requests than usual you have a much higher chance of getting rate limited therefore its recommended you only do this for 1 task on your local host and not the usual 3 you can get away with normally. However running just 1 task is putting a lot of trust in the size it picks up to have a decent amount of stock. This is why we recommend you still keep it simple but run 1 task on your local host and 1-3 more tasks on ISP's.
BOTS THAT EXCELL ON SHOPIFY
MANUAL SETUP
Going manual on Shopify can be very difficult. You are up against thousands of people running multiple bots all for likely less than 500 pairs total.
On a very select few Shopify drops, bots will completely fail and manual users will take stock. This only really happens on sites that are using brand new Shopify systems that are not usually used. Although going manual on Shopify is near impossible to compete, there are some things that can help you.
QUEUE BYPASS
The queue bypass is in the name. This trick allows you to completely bypass the queue giving you a massive head start. This trick is what the PRELOAD mode is based off on bots, its essentially the same system. Here is how you do it manually:
Go to the site you want to perform the queue bypass for
Around 2 minutes before the scheduled drop add a random product to your cart
Click checkout
Add all your information to the required fields
Go through the whole checkout process until you get to the page that asks for your payment details
Once you are on this payment details bookmark this page URL
Remove the item from your cart
Once your desired item has dropped add it to cart
Click checkout
Solve the checkpoint captcha if necessary
Once you are in the queue click the bookmarked URL
You have now bypassed the queue and can now add your payment details to purchase
MONITORS
Shopify monitors have great uses for bot and manual user. Below is an example of a monitor ping for a random product that just dropped on a Shopify site. As we know from the monitors guide, x monitor will monitor x site for new products or restocks. So we can use this to get ATC links of an item that just dropped as a part of the monitor ping is built in ATC links.
The hyperlinks highlighted in purple are called ATC links. Each link adds a specific size to your cart on that site, instantly. The QT links you don't need to worry about as these are "Quick Tasks" for bots. For example if you clicked the 10 / PURPLE hyperlink it would add a size 10 of that particular product to your cart. This is very useful as it is quicker to do this than refresh the page at the scheduled drop time > find the desired product > add your desired size to cart > click checkout. The ATC link instantly adds the specific size for that specific product to your cart giving you a few seconds advantage.
RECOMMENDED MANUAL SETUP
If the site is not using a password page you will be able to perform the queue bypass. If the site is using a password page, skip straight to step 3.
Around 2 minutes before the scheduled drop perform the queue bypass.
Once you have done that head over to the monitors in DreamCook.
Check to see if we provide a dedicated monitor for that site, if we don't click the #shopify-filtered channel.
Wait for the desired product to popup on the monitor
Click your desired sizes ATC link and click checkout
Solve a checkpoint captcha if necessary
Once in the queue click the bookmarked queue bypass link
Fill in your details and checkout ASAP
If you were not quick enough and the desired item is OOS, you can manually try to hit a restock by deleting stock_problems from the URL and clicking enter over and over again until hopefully it comes back in stock and you checkout.
Again, going manual on Shopify is very hard and you are atleast going to need some type of autofill or tool to help you out. DreamCook will soon be releasing a FREE autofill with Shopify auto checkout so keep your 👀 peeled
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