Shop Disney has always been a busy website for online shopping, especially since over the last year they’ve added more items from Disney Parks. This allows people at home, who wouldn’t normally have a chance to get to the parks, still purchase some of their favorite items.
Since the parks have been closed, Shop Disney is busier than ever. In the past few months, they’ve also been focusing on limited edition items and collections. Minnie Mouse: The Main Attraction has been a huge success. It’s released every third Saturday of the month and is essentially new Minnie products, based on popular attractions from Disney Parks. There have been limited edition Mickey ears by Imagineer Joe Rohde, and Her Universe designer, Ashley Eckstein.
For some lucky shoppers, they were able to snag these coveted items, for others- not so much. Several times, Shop Disney’s website has crashed. It’s gotten to the point now when I’m on the site and ready to check out, as I click “confirm payment,” I say a little prayer that the site doesn’t crash. You would assume a website like Shop Disney, would be equipped to handle the flow of traffic (especially during a limited release), but that’s not always the case.
The good news is, Shop Disney has addressed the problem and continue to work on it. They’ve set up virtual wait rooms, which help with the number of people coming to the website for one specific product. I was familiar with the idea, having shopped the Lilly Pulitzer After Party Sale, and waited in my fair share of virtual waiting rooms. The thing is, you can only hope that the one product you want will be there when you do get out of the waiting room. That’s where Shop Disney has had major issues.
Have you noticed that sometimes items are sold out within seconds? You question the website and think to yourself, that it can’t be humanly possible for them to sell out so fast. That’s because it’s not. Humans aren’t buying the products, bots are. Then you go on websites like eBay and find the products marked up sometimes triple the price of what Shop Disney had them for. The truth is, several companies do this when it comes to collectible items, and Disney collectibles are a hot commodity.
Bots are programmed to act like a human and carry out specific tasks within a retailer’s mobile app, such as buying up all of a limited-edition item. That undermines the experience of legitimate consumers.loyal customers. Because bots simulate real human behavior, it’s extremely hard to detect them. The one chance where developers can win is by looking at human behavioral patterns.
One site, flipology.io, snatched up hundreds of items during last weekend’s Minnie Mouse The Main Attraction launch. This month’s collection was themed after The Enchanted Tiki Room. Their “team” is bots. They will try to resell these items at much higher a cost. Unfortunately, they will be successful at selling them because at the end of the day, people want these items.
Twitter users have called out these companies, demanding action from Shop Disney. When new, limited edition Star Wars items were released earlier this month, @caffeineandpix1 was quick to call out Shop Disney.
Shop Disney, although it’s not often, did reply to her tweet. They thanked her for bringing it to their attention and were forwarded the info to their executive team.
Another site, @stockstolen, even bragged about everything they were able to purchase using bots. When Twitter users started to call them out to Shop Disney, the account responded back and it wasn’t friendly. Is this the type of business Shop Disney wants to be associated with?
It remains to be seen what Shop Disney is doing to correct their bot problem. Although virtual waiting rooms will help with real consumers and traffic flow, a bot has all day to wait in one. A virtual waiting room won’t fix that problem. One of the things they could do is install CAPTCHA. You’ve seen CAPTCHA many times, it’s where you have to check off boxes that have certain things, and then check off that you’re not a robot. CAPTCHA prevents any spam or bots from entering data into fields on your site. This can include fake comments on posts, emails, fraudulent transactions, contact form entries, and fake registration submissions.
Shop Disney could also require everyone who’s purchasing on their site to have an online account. Bots don’t have accounts and by signing into yours, then shopping, it would eliminate bot traffic.
What has your Shop Disney shopping experience been like? Is there an item you’ve wanted that sold out within minutes, only to end up on eBay? The positive takeaway from this is that Shop Disney is well aware of the issue and I trust they are doing everything they can to prevent it from happening. Hopefully, by the next Minnie Mouse: The Main Attraction drop, they will have corrected the problem.
As a consumer, we can do something about it too. We can refuse to shop sites like eBay that are reselling these items at double or triple the price. If you really want to pay $300 for Minnie Ears that were only $70 an hour prior, that’s your business. But it also feeds into the bot business and only makes them that much more successful.
