Summary: Using Python web scraping libraries Requests and Beautiful Soup, as well as third party software, I was able to purchase and sell limited collectibles on platforms like Facebook, eBay, and StockX. I used Intuit Quickbooks and Excel for bookkeeping and conducting P&L management for both my business as a whole, and for each major sector I was involved in (shoes, clothes, electronics, and trading cards). I also used Excel for data analysis of the latest trends in each industry to find new areas and opportunities for growth. In order to create my brand, I became proficient in graphic design, social media marketing, sales, and customer relations, as well as conducting extensive Voice of Customer (VoC) research. After approximately three years, I was able to generate more than $160,000 in revenue with a little over $55,000 net profit.

At the end of March 2020, the sneaker industry was turned upside down. As you can probably guess, it was a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused massive supply chain shortages. Immediately, popular shoes like Jordans and Yeezys became nearly impossible to purchase for retail price, causing prices to soar on secondary marketplaces. As a sneakerhead, I wanted to find a way to avoid paying asinine resale prices and purchase my favorite shoes for retail prices.

I started out by trying to game the newly made raffle release system for my local Finish Line. Using an email domain and the power of SMS, I made accounts for all of my family members and friends to enter into raffles. As they only required ID confirmation upon winning, I’d pay them ten bucks to come pick up the shoes with me if their account won. Using this method, I was able to get my first pair of post-COVID shoes at the start of May, the Jordan 13 “Flint” colorway.

As I started to figure out the intricacies of the not so random raffle system, I realized that there was massive potential to turn my hobby into a business. I decided to set up an account on StockX, an ecommerce platform for selling shoes, clothes, and other collectibles. Using my dozens of accounts, I was able to consistently purchase multiple pairs of shoes each release, flipping the ones I didn’t like on StockX and using the money to justify keeping the coolest pairs for myself. That summer, my little side hustle started to take off and I decided to look for ways to upscale my operation into a full-fledged business.

After extensive research, I decided to take the plunge and use automation software to upscale my business by allowing me to have a competitive chance at buying shoes from online retail sites. I started out by learning the basics of web scraping with Python, playing around with the requests and beautiful soup libraries in Python. After months of experimentation, I was able to make a basic Python automation bot for purchasing shoes on sites like Nike and Adidas. However, I soon realized I’d need a much more powerful bot to compete with the thousands of people using professional grade software. I made the monumental decision to pool all of the money I’d made plus everything I had saved to go all in on botting and purchase PrismAIO, my first true sneaker bot.

A common misconception with sneaker botting is that once you have the software, you simply click a button and then suddenly 20 pairs of the newest Jordans show up at your house. This belief couldn’t be further from the truth. It took me approximately five months before I saw a positive return on my initial investment, and I’ve seen many people never make it into the green. Having professional grade automation software simply allowed me to get my foot in the door. From there on I had to work tirelessly to optimize my setup of tasks, proxies, accounts, profiles, and more.

I know I just threw a bunch of words at you, so I’ll do my best to explain the nitty gritty details of sneaker botting without putting you to sleep. Before I even press the start button on my bot, I have to set up my tasks. An easy way to visualize a task is that it’s like one person with an auto clicker attempting to buy the single product that I specified. While it heavily depends on the site, I could run up to 5,000 tasks at once with PrismAIO. However, anti-botting software can detect if too many requests are coming from the same IP address and ban all requests from that address. To avoid this, each task needs to be assigned with a proxy, which provides each request with its own unique IP address. While this sounds like a straightforward solution, it is anything but. There are hundreds of different proxy providers and types, making finding good proxies one of the most difficult parts of botting.

After that, I have to get past the software that detects if too many orders are being placed with the same billing and shipping info. Dealing with this requires a combination of address jigging (making slight changes to the address for each order, ex: 123 Main St or 123 Main Street), using an email catch-all & SMS, and creating virtual credit cards that link to one bank account. All of that is just the bare minimum. Each site requires additional tools or accounts to bypass their specific bot protection, such as large scale captcha solving with Capmonster Cloud API, using software to generate activity for google accounts or site-specific accounts, and more.

After starting out with just sneakers, I decided to try and expand to as many markets as possible. I expanded the use of my software and my brand (more on that later) to clothing, trading cards, electronics, art pieces, and basically any sector with limited items. In addition, I decided to buy more software programs that specialized in sites that PrismAIO was weaker at. At the peak of my expansion, I had a total of seven different software programs, valued between $500 up to over $5,000 each depending on the software.

Of course, purchasing these limited items is only part of my business. Even more important than buying products is being able to sell them for profit. I started out by selling on the simplest and safest platform, StockX. If you haven’t heard of it, StockX is a third party marketplace for a variety of limited items, with an emphasis on shoes. Selling was as simple as hooking up my PayPal, scrolling to the standard, premade listing of the shoe I was selling, and entering my asking price as the current lowest asking price. Once my anonymous listing was up, I was notified once the pair was sold and provided with a shipping label for my shoes. The money, minus the hefty fees collected by StockX, was sent to my PayPal around ten to fifteen days after shipping out the shoes.

While selling on StockX was easy, simple, and safe, once my business began to grow I needed to new platform for a few key reasons. The first reason was the aforementioned fees—I lost around 15% total of each transaction due to the various fees and tax. The second reason was the lack of differentiation due to the standardization and anonymity of sellers. This meant that the sole way for sellers to compete was by lower prices, often resulting in a dramatic decrease of prices if multiple sellers needed to unload shoes to have capital for an upcoming, more profitable release. This leads into the third and most problematic issue with selling on StockX—the sale processing time. As I expanded, I became limited due to a lack of capital caused by having to wait for up to two weeks to receive the money for every single sale. After a year of StockX, I made the decision to switch to a new platform that would hopefully remedy these issues—Facebook Marketplace.

Selling on Facebook marketplace was completely different from StockX. On Facebook marketplace, I had to create each listing from scratch, suing my own title, description, and photos. In addition, I had to talk and negotiate with each potential buyer before selling the shoes to the buyer in person. While this took much more effort, the potential for profit was much higher, as it allowed for product differentiation with no fees. In order to effectively sell on Facebook marketplace, I had to build my own brand as a seller. I decided to call my business “Jay B Kicks” for selling shoes and clothes (kicks was a play on words since I’m also a martial artist). I used the moniker Jay B Collectibles for everything else, although I eventually shortened “Jay B” to “JB” for both. This was just one of the many changes in the evolution of my brand made thanks to Voice of Customer (VoC) research. After each sale, I would ask the customer about their opinions on the whole buying process and if there was any room for improvement. I received a ton of incredible feedback on how to make my listings more trustworthy, streamline the buying process, and improve brand recognition. In addition, I’d ask about any upcoming shoes they had their eyes on, and create a contact list of customers for each shoe size and type for future sales. Overall, Facebook marketplace truly did solve the shortcomings of StockX. I was able to instantly receive payment with no additional fees and differentiate my products by creating a brand backed by reliability and authenticity.

I like to think of the final third of running my business as everything I needed to do after a sale. This consisted of bookkeeping and business analysis with Excel and Intuit. Initially, I just used the selling reports from StockX and credit card statements to keep track of my expenditures and revenue. However, as I expanded I realized that simple method would not suffice. I started out with a simple Excel spreadsheet, progressively adding useful functionality such as ROI calculation based on product type, sales platform, and other parameters. In addition, I imported StockX sales charts into Excel to analyze market trends across various shoe types. This allowed me to optimize the time of year I would sell certain shoes at for maximum profit, as well as find which sector to focus on at a certain time based on past trends. Finally, I started using Intuit QuickBooks to create Profit and Loss (P&L) statements, as well as for more advanced bookkeeping across the various sectors my business operated in.

By combining automated product acquisition, online sales and brand development, and business management and analysis, I was able to start and run a fully fledged business throughout high school. When it was all said and done, I had generated over $160,000 in revenue with more than $55,000 in net profit. More importantly, I developed a variety of both hard and soft skills that will help me for the rest of my life.