Too few Fingerlings? Blame it on the bots
Software snatches up hot items, resells them at marked-up prices
Fingerlings, those colourful chirping monkeys (and sloths and unicorns) that wrap around your finger, have become one of the most desired toys on holiday shopping lists.
Unfortunately, the $25 (U.S.) creatures are sold out online almost everywhere. Toys R Us? Gone. Walmart? None left in stock. Mastermind? Nope.
But check eBay or Amazon, and sellers are offering them for double, triple and quadruple their original price. There is even one being advertised for $5,000.
The proliferation of online shopping has made it even tougher to purchase coveted items because of software that snaps them up as soon as they are offered for sale.
“If it’s popular, it’s going to be taken by bots and resold,” said Omri Iluz, the co-founder and CEO of the cybersecurity firm Perimeter X.
The moment an item is in stock, the bot software runs through the checkout process at a speed that is “completely inhuman,” said Iluz, whose company protects organizations from bot attacks.
The bots are drawn to scarce items and use webscraping techniques to guess the ID of an unreleased product, Perimeter X explains on its website. That allows scalpers to buy products before an official sale becomes public. Bots can also subscribe to online notifications of sales and bypass purchasing limits set by retailers by using multiple internet addresses.
Laura Oliver, who blogs about deals on her website, AFrugal Chick, has been keeping tabs on Fingerlings, the brainchild of the company Wow Wee, for months, and notified her readers on Facebook whenever she found a retailer that had them in stock.
On Amazon, Fingerlings priced at $15 will sometimes last as long as 25 minutes, Oliver said.
“I’ve had readers comment that they’ve put the Fingerlings in their cart on the Walmart website and when they go to check out, it’s gone,” she said.
Walmart did not respond to a request for comment.
In Canada, Mastermind Toys says it’s “working hard to acquire more Fingerlings over the next few weeks.
“There is always a hot toy in demand each holiday season,” the company said in a statement. “Last year it was Hat-chimals and this year it’s Fingerlings, which have been a huge hit at all of Mastermind Toys’ 60 locations and are selling quickly as soon as they hit the shelves.”
Additionally, the company said in an email to the Star’s Lisa Wright that it’s mindful of the bot problem and trying to combat it.
“Mastermind Toys has procedures in place to ensure that the product being sold is getting into the hands of real consumers. We limit quantities of items that can be purchased online and in store to deter this type of reseller activity, and the web team monitors and reviews suspicious online orders,” the Toronto-based toy giant said.
Toys R Us says on its website that Fingerlings are available in its brickand-mortar stores. When asked about the cyber-bots, the retailer de- clined to comment, referring instead to a statement from Christin Fernandez, vice-president for communications for the Retail Industry Leaders Association that said retailers and suppliers “are working around the clock to make sure American families have access to the season’s hottest items” and are “committed to taking precautions to mitigate fraud and illegal transactions.”
Amazon said Tuesday that it monitors bot buying activity and attempts to limit the purchase of high-demand products. On Amazon.ca Friday morning, Fingerlings were selling for $70 (Canadian).
Other hot toys, such as the L.O.L. Surprise! Doll and the Super Nintendo Entertainment System NES Classic Edition, have also sold out, but are appearing online, advertised at prices several times higher than retail.
“The entire ecosystem breaks down,” Iluz said. Bots are making legal purchases, but they do not become loyal customers and they will not leave positive reviews.
And customers get frustrated.
“When an advertised item is unavailable because of out-of-stocks, customers don’t blame bots, they blame the retailer,” Roger Beahm, a professor of marketing at the Wake Forest University School of Business, said in an email.
The Ontario government introduced new legislation that will ban the use or sale of ticket bots — software that can quickly scoop up huge numbers of tickets online — and also put a ceiling on what can be charged.
For parents who were left emptyhanded after searching for popular toys, there are still plenty of gifts out there that children will love — like Magna-Tiles or the Hatchimals that were so hard to find last year.
The yearly rush to buy the hottest toy is often guided by emotions, Beahm said.
“Sometimes it’s important to remain a little more rational in our purchase decisions,” he added, and to remember the fate of fad items like the Beanie Babies, which are now “practically worthless.” With files from the Star’s Lisa Wright