The service acts as an information terminal for resellers. For 100 dollars a month, its approximately 850 paying users receive real-time alerts about discrepancies at various retailers.
In a comment to Fortune, the founder explains that their system constantly searches for anomalies and the monitors scrape product pages around the clock. Through this method, users have been able to order game consoles and computers for 50 to 100 dollars, although e-commerce companies sometimes manage to cancel the order before delivery.
Legal Gray Area
The business model is in a legal gray area. Some e-commerce companies' terms of use prohibit, for example, scraping data to train artificial intelligence, but do not explicitly mention automated monitoring for purchasing purposes. However, the founder claims that the methods are entirely legal.
Gian Luca Clementi, a professor of economics at New York University, explains that technology has made it easier to find these opportunities and that the market now encompasses the whole world. For e-commerce companies, the rapid technological development means an increased need to protect platforms from automated purchases and ensure correct pricing from the start.