I can confirm that this is a thing... a bigger thing than one might think. I run an IaaS cloud provider and I know off the top of my head several customers of ours who each maintain a fleet of VMs to do this for a variety of products. Eg: Limited edition shoes, show tickets, etc. Some of our customers who do this keep the VMs running and some fire them up only when needed. Some use custom software and scripts and some use purchased software designed specifically for the sites and products they want to beat others to.
Regardless of how he knows, you can also google "sneaker bot" and you'll find a vast underground that deals in this trade of scalping limited edition sneakers.
Surprising or not, they do. I suppose some people may feel as you do, but many do not. Many of our customers look at us as a resource for how best to use the Infrastructure we offer as a Service and share a great deal of detail.
Large operations always tend to communicate with their service providers at some level.
Likewise I imagine these types of companies tend to generate some level of complaint from sellers to the provider. They are really aggressive bots that can create attack level traffic spikes, and break a sellers TOS (snicker) in some cases.
People call on the telephone and discuss their plans, requirements, and business models before signing up. Often, once they are customers they may discuss with us ways to optimize. We check in from time to time and often they call us about their upcoming efforts to see if we have input. Of course there are some that we don't hear from at all, but whose web site at their email domains clearly spell out their businesses.
It's a common and well known business model. We have Web hosting companies, game servers, mobile apps, cloud-managed gizmos, SaaS platforms, etc... all are common well known business models. Do you know any more about them because of this post or the information I have talked about? Maybe you didn't know they business model exists.
I should add that some sites (especially ones counting on ad revenue, or that don't want "scalpers") may consider bots hitting them as abusive and will either contact us or just block specific IPs. At that point we know what is going on. Our customer may call us because "it stopped working" when they have been blocked or rate limited. I will point out that many sites that bots hit do not care at all and know it is happening.
Ha don't jump to conclusions so quickly. We spend > $50k/mo on AWS and you better believe our solution architects deeply understand our product and architecture.
Reminds me of why I still prefer brick and mortar. Yes you may have to camp out, but it definitely has a better success rate than trying to compete against machines.
It's the first time I saw "snipers" in this context. "Sniper" is the name we use in Poland for scripts set up to bid at eBay-like auctions. They are the reason I never buy anything from an auction (where I have to bid), and I stick only to buy-now, retail offers. It's because on any auction it's guaranteed that there is always some schmuck that will outbid you by 1¢ at the last microsecond with a sniper script. Proliferation of those scripts makes auctioning a waste of attention and emotional investment.
Our local auction site here in New Zealand, TradeMe, does that. Any bid in the last 2 minutes resets the clock to 2 minutes. Works pretty well for the seller, as prices tend to jump dramatically in these two minutes.
There is also at least one auction site with a similar business model that is practically a legal scam; bids cost money/points, and every bid increases the price by a fixed amount and extend the clock. Non-successful bids aren't paid back, of course.
Personally I find sniping quite enjoyable (as an idle-activity), but I also consider "recon" part of it (finding mislabelled or less widely known items that get the same job done usually results in huge effective discounts).
