Selenium ATC Bot
To start, what is an ATC Bot? ATC stands for Add To Cart Bot. An ATC Bot is a coded script, that when ran with its given parameters, will find the desired item and add it to your cart and in some cases, check out for you. Using Python as my workspace of choice, I researched to find a library that would help me get to this goal. I settled on Selenium as it is easy to use and there are loads of forums for it. Now this initial build in Selenium is not my final product, it is just to be used as a proof of concept before developing the final product.
Track the progress of my project on GitHub by clicking this button below!
In the Sneakers and Streetwear industry, it is very hard to buy highly sought-after products online. This issue arises due to bots, or ATC bots. These bots use a script, or code to be able to navigate Shopify or other retailer websites and buy the desired product that was inputted by the user. Not only can these bots check out in mere seconds, but they also circumnavigate the regular web traffic and bot detection by running off of servers that run the tasks (or what the script is doing), through multiple different IP Addresses.
With all this knowledge in mind, I set out to use Python to attempt to recreate something similar. To try to recreate such a piece of software, I first researched the possible libraries that could be used to do such tasks. I eventually settled on using the Selenium library. Selenium allows one to be able to open an instance of a browser and use the web elements from a websites HTML code. With the Selenium library and using footlocker.ca as my test subject, I would create a proof of concept.
My proof of concept would need to be able to open Microsoft Edge, intake a desired website, navigate to the search bar or launch products, click on a desired launch product and wait until it can be added to cart and add it, or search for a user inputted product, refine the search using the websites filters and add the desired product to cart.
After 6 hours of working on the project, spread over 2 days, I was able to achieve roughly 40% of my goal. I got my script to be able to open Microsoft Edge, intake user input and either go to a launch product or search for a product. My next goal is to get the program to be able to use the filters on the website to be able to refine the search and check button states to see if a product can be added to the cart.