The World Of Re-Selling Shoes For A Living
Sneakers have been a culture trend dating all the way back to the 1980s. It mostly started with hip-hop groups and movements in New York City. The shoes that started the biggest market of shoes that still is today is Michael Jordan and Nike with there collaboration of the Air Jordan lineup.
The sneaker reselling market has been around since the shoe market couldn’t meet the demand. As shoes were released dating back to the original Jordan’s reselling prices started going up and people started making a living by reselling shoes. As of right now the older the shoe the more the shoe is valued as long as it was popular to begin with. The shoe market is very similar to a stock market and just because some shoes resell does not mean every shoe will resell.
There isn’t anything specific to a shoe that makes it more valuable material wise or quality but mostly comes down to the built up hype behind the shoe and its release. Majority of the shoes that release today that are popular are often collaborations with other celebrities or famous brands such as Travis Scott or Off-White. Majority of shoes that do release are considered “GR” which stands for Global Release which every shoe is but just has a lot more stock than the limited shoes. A shoe such as the Off-White Chicago released in a much lower quantity than say your basic Jordan shoe that you can walk into a local sports store and pick up. This makes the shoe a lot higher in demand because once they release these more hype shoes they often never restock or make more.
Reselling didn’t always take place online and through other companies it originally started out as people just trading with each other individually. This companies have changed the world of sneaker reselling and has made it more safe and secure. Before these existed majority of resellers and buyers resorted to eBay to sell and purchase there sneakers if they could not find them in person or at local resell shops. Selling and buying on eBay is a lot more risky with the possibility of getting a fake or replica pair of the shoes you want to buy which are not made by the company and counterfeited by someone else to give people the “knockoff” version of a shoe to wear or for people to take advantage of and try and sell as the real pair from per say Nike and make the big money and scam people.
These companies such as StockX and Goat are the main ones that when you sell a shoe on there website or market it goes through various processes before it reaches the buyer. When selling a shoe through them you first ship the shoe to the company and they do a legit check on the sneaker before sending it and processing the payment from the buyer which ultimately helps buyers not have to worry about paying top dollar for a fake shoe. These companies make money by taking a percentage of the price you sold the shoe for which is where they make there profit but still giving the seller a great value and security for selling authentic sneakers.
Currently in 2020 during the pandemic you would think the sneaker community would die down because of people not being able to go out as much or have the want to buy sneakers but it has not died at all and still is steadily increasing. The sneaker reselling world is turning into peoples full time jobs and hobbies but making it harder every day for the average consumer to buy a shoe that is popular due to the resellers taking over the market by obtaining hundreds of pairs of shoes for retail price using bots on release taking advantage of the regular users who try to get them manually for personal use.
Bots are one of the biggest ways to make reselling a living. When a shoe is released on for example people will run a bot or a program that speeds up the checkout process when buying sneakers online. A normal person trying to check out a shoe will have to manually add the shoe to there online cart then add all of there banking information and shipping information then checkout while a bot does all of that automatically in seconds and as many times as you would like. This gives someone running a bot the chance to get almost 20 plus shoes per release and majority of the time making the manual user get no pairs almost every time now.
Running a bot although sounds like the best option for anyone wanting to purchase sneakers for personal or resell value seems like would be the best option however is very expensive. There are lots of bots created and sold by different creators for different sites and can be extremely expensive ranging from $400 to over $4,000 for a program to do this. The main people who purchase these bots are for the sole purpose of reselling because they can easily make back the profit on that bot in no time.
For example lets say Nike is having a hype shoe release with a retail price of $160 and the resell of the shoe will range around $1,000. A person running a bot will run usually over a 100 accounts if not more and usually securing around 20 or more pairs of shoes. If the reseller gets 20 pairs of the shoes on release for $160 which is a total purchase of $3,200 before tax and shipping. The profit however is extreme with a value of $20,000 if each shoe can be sold for $1,000 profiting the reseller $16,800 with maybe around a total of 30 minutes worth of work from purchasing to dropping the shoes off at UPS after you have received them.
The world of sneaker reselling is constantly growing and getting harder and harder every time due to the increase amount of resellers using bots and making it nearly impossible for people to get hype releases for personal wear due to the resellers and bots getting almost every shoe making the public having to pay these high resell prices. The main question people say is or think that sneaker reselling will die eventually and no one will pay those prices. But in the end there is always people willing to drive up the market and pay those high end prices to be unique with there fashion statement keeping the sneaker world growing everyday and giving the resellers a nice paycheck every time a popular shoe is due to release.
