The Best Retail Botting Guide

Retail botting is a category that is growing more popular every day, and encompasses sites like Walmart, Target, Amazon, Bestbuy, and even sites like Newegg and PokemonCenter.

All of these sites are different, and require different things to run them. There are also a number of different bots that support these sites ranging heavily in price.

Walmart

To start off, Walmart is a very popular site for botters and frequently restocks and drops next-gen consoles, sports and trading cards, and GPUs. Walmart has bot protection in the form of PX, or Perimeter X Solution. This bot protection is always changing, and can be at different levels throughout the day or for drops.

PX protects the site by giving captchas for the user to solve. When the bot protection is at a high level, you will often encounter many captchas to solve.

Some bots have a bypass for this bot protection, but most use third-party captcha solvers like Capmonster and 2Captcha. Autosolve by AYCD Toolbox has also integrated an AI (Artificial Intelligence) that allows you to let your gmail score help solve the captcha, and an AI to select the pictures on the captcha.

Proxies play a large factor in how much bot protection you’ll encounter, and the more private and less used your proxies are, the better off you’ll be. For this reason, the best proxies to use are clean ISP’s, private residential, EU residential. Using EU Resi proxies might not be a known trick, but it turns out these are not commonly used on Walmart and for that reason they don’t recognize these IP’s and flag them.

Delays you use will range a lot depending on the bot you’re using, and you should follow the guides provided by them.

Accounts can be used to try and avoid cancels when running, but aren’t necessary ever. Users have found more success with orders sticking when using accounts for consoles especially. If using accounts, you should try and use IP’s that are relatively similar in location on the same account. For example, don’t use Virginia ISP’s on the same account that you use EU Resi, as Walmart will notice this.

There are many bots that support Walmart and the list continues to grow. Many private bots perform very well on Walmart like Trickle. Bots that are easier to access would be Stellar, Koi, Fluid, Estock, Ominous, KSR, Hayha, etc. For more information to help on which bot to pick, check out the “Best Bots for Retail Sites” article.

Walmart’s drop time follows a pattern, and they usually restock sports cards and consoles on weekdays at 3pm EST/12pm PST. The restocks of graphics cards are always random, and they have dropped digital consoles at early in the morning before (3am EST/12am PST), however the afternoon is much more frequent.

Target

Target is another very popular site for botters, specifically for their sports cards and console drops. The bot protection and way to bot the site however, is much different.

To start, there are no captchas on Target. While you might think that allows you to run 24/7, there is no need and you won’t be able to.

This is because Target requires accounts to purchase online for shipping or for in-store pickup. These accounts + the bot you run them on are your key to not getting cancels. For accounts, you always want to use real @gmail.com domain emails and never catchalls or another domain. You should try and not access the account from many different IP addresses, as this will cause Target to lock your account and require a password reset.

These account locks are random and usually caused by a change in IP addresses but this is not always the case as Target’s bot protection is not an exact science.

Cancels are also a very large issue for many bots that support Target. One small tip to avoid cancels is to not always run the max quantity of the item you’re trying to get. This mainly affects sports cards, you're more likely to get cancels when running the highest quantity allowed.However, while having clean accounts and following that tip can help, the bot is the main reason for many cancellations. Many bots have tried to get around this with things like Paypal checkout, checkout delays, and other things.

Some bots that currently support Target and get orders to stick are KSR, Stellar, Koi, and Fluid.

The drop time of Target is very consistent and predictable. They have always dropped on weekdays anywhere from 6am EST to 9am EST. In the past Tuesday’s and Friday’s were the most popular days for drops, however they continue to change it up.

A small sidenote, when running for console’s on Target, in-store pickup is the only option available and you should not run for shipping. However, most other items are shipping like sports cards.

Amazon

On to Amazon, one of the most popular sites for botters to secure graphics cards. They frequently restock small quantities of GPUs in which the entirety of stock is taken by bots. Amazon is a very competitive site bot-wise and the setup in which you use is important, but is not all that matters.

Amazon accounts are required for all purchases however many are locked once purchasing a high-ticket item like a graphics card. This happens because of a switch of billing info, the accounts age, a switch of IP addresses, or just because of the purchase of a GPU. After this, you’ll be prompted to prove your identity with a credit card statement or such. After completing this, your account will be much harder to lock and you’ll get many more orders to stick.

It is highly suggested to purposefully lock your account before running for GPUs. You can do this by changing all the info, and then purchasing something expensive. You should also not access all your accounts on your home IP, and instead use a single dedicated IP for each account, and you can switch between using an extension like BP Proxy Switcher.

Before jumping into the modes most bots use, let's talk about proxies. The best proxies to use on Amazon are fast ISP’s or DC’s. The faster the better.

For delays, this depends on the mode you are running on your bot. Some common modes are cloud mode, serverside mode, and then monitor tasks. The difference between these modes is as follows.

For bots that have implemented cloud mode, this mode allows the user to enter their account into the bot, select the SKU’s or items they want to be run for (if allowed), and then the bot does the rest of the work. No proxies, no need to edit delays or anything like that. The bot does the entirety of the work using their own monitoring and such on the servers of the bot devs.

Serverside uses the same type of monitoring, where a SKU is monitored on a server by devs and then the task is started when it picks up as in-stock. Only difference here is the user has more control and can create tasks with their own delays, proxies that are used for checkout, etc.

Monitor tasks are where the user uses their own proxies to monitor a SKU and when the task picks it up as in-stock, their tasks will start to attempt to check out. This mode is the slowest, gets proxies banned easier, and least likely to check out for you because delays have to be higher. This mode is less utilized now, and should only be used on bots when a product is not being monitored serverside.

Now we can get into delays. If you’re running a bot that supports cloud mode, you don’t set your delays. The most popular bot that supports this is estock, but bots like SnailBot, Fake AIO, and more do as well.

When running serverside you’ll want your delays low since you’re not monitoring and tasks only run when the item goes in-stock. As long as you don’t have too many tasks for the same account running on low delays for a long time you should be fine running low delays. This is the most popular mode for bots and some bots that support it are Stellar, Ominous, and Viper.

When running monitor tasks you don’t want your delays too low or Amazon will temporarily ban your proxies. However, if they are too high you won’t pick up the restock quick enough. This is the dilemma when running this type of mode and why many bots have moved away from it.

Bestbuy

Botting Bestbuy is much different from botting any retail site, or any site in general. This is because with most bots the automation process can not be completed without the user.

For most bots, you start tasks and once they get through the queue and get the item in cart, a browser opens up which allows you to log into your account and checkout like normal. The only exception to this is SWFT.

Bestbuy botting is relatively simple in this sense because proxies can be any to your liking, delays do not need to be very low or high, and you just need to follow the bot guides to set up.

Some bots add queue bypasses like Stellar which allow you to automatically cart the item right away and then check out.

Other than this, Bestbuy is relatively simple to bot and the only thing to know is copping multiple on one account can get orders cancelled and to avoid this you can try paypal but the best way is to have multiple accounts.

Bestbuy typically is pickup only for consoles and graphics cards. If you see that the item you desire is not in stock at a local store in your area, you can try to order it at a different store and then call and get them to ship it to your store. Some users find success with this method but others are told it can’t be done. It is up to the user to decide if you want to do this.

Best Bots

For an in-depth guide and explanation on retail bots, read our article on the “Best Bots for Retail Sites”.

A quick run-down on current bots

Stellar AIO: One of the cheapest retail bots and supports all major retail sites and performs very well. Best budget option, large userbase.

Koi AIO: Very good on Walmart, doesn’t support as much as other bots because it is not strictly retail, pretty cheap.

Fluid: Very cheap retail bot, cooked a few months ago and performance dropped since then. Devs have shown huge updates in the works that are being tested and have shown success with them.

Estock: Very popular bot and released “cloud mode” which cooked for a little and then performance and price dropped heavily. Requires users to pay a hefty fee to get access to amazon cloud mode. Their Walmart module is very good.

Ominous: Mainly Canada focused bot but still cooks in the US. Pretty expensive for a retail bot and just recently added Bestbuy.

KSR: Best bot for Target and good for Walmart, exclusive to GFNF however keys are available through GFNF staff on the aftermarket.

There are many more bots including private ones however these are the most readily available ones on the market.

Takeaway

Retail botting is a very in depth, time consuming, and lucrative way to bot. While every site is different, if you can learn the in’s and out’s of each you can see great success with high margin items such as consoles, graphics cards, and sports cards.