Authors:
Shay Merchant, Liah Carpenter, Suzanne Griep, Sean Hebert, Blair Helms, Natalia Kechedzhieva, Collin Kersten, Linda Newton, Donna Roberts, Matthew Slessman, Jessica Snead, Scott Summey
Abstract:
This disclosure proposes a web extension to prevent scalping on high demand items. The extension will increase the likelihood legitimate shoppers will be able to purchase high demand items and decrease illegitimate shoppers such as scalping bots. The web extension handles each shoppers’ queue priority and authenticates each user through multi-part authentication. This extension works across multiple retailers and is able to retain a user’s priority in the queue across multiple retailers.
Background:
There is extremely high web traffic for high-demand items such as computer chips, game consoles, tickets, and athletic footwear. The high web traffic is caused by illegitimate traffic such as scalpers and bots (14% of web traffic is bots designed to mimic human behavior), and legitimate traffic; and this high web traffic prevents legitimate users from purchasing items.
There are several known solutions to this problem, each with drawbacks:
- Two-step checkouts (clicking checkout twice), but they do not authenticate or differentiate between legitimate and illegitimate traffic.
- Queue without authentication, which quickly becomes overwhelmed by high bot traffic.
- Traditional "captcha" style authentication, which can be spoofed by bots that use scraping and machine learning.
- Lottery systems, which can become overwhelmed by illegitimate accounts and users.
Description:
A web extension authenticates a user after creating an account using two part authentication to verify each user is unique and authentic. This is done by first authenticating the user by requiring the user to take a picture of their license, or ID. This is followed by a hardware diagnosis that ties the users ID to their unique, system hardware configuration.
This system will detect anomalies in authentication such as an ID spammed with the same system configuration, or highly similar IDs detected with multiple system configurations. Detecting spam of either portion of authentication will invalidate or remove the user from the queue.
The web extension will also create a priority queue for each user depending on the high demand product they are shopping for. After shopping each time, if the user is unable to purchase the product they are shopping for, then they will be moved up in the priority queue, increasing their likelihood they will be able to purchase the product the next time.
TGCS Reference 2564
