Supreme moving to Shopify will help their fight against Bots!

Despite botters already successfully botting Supremes’ first release on Shopify, we believe that Shopify will help Supreme prevent bots from their releases! This might seem counterintuitive because Shopify is one of the most successfully targeted platforms by bots; however, Shopify will enable Supreme to become more agile in fighting bots.

The largest benefit for Supreme, like any brand moving to an e-commerce platform compared to custom build, is removing a significant amount of overhead needed to maintain their site. Instead of being solely responsible, Supreme will benefit from some of the embedded security features, Shop Pay (i.e., checkout), and ease of installing integrated solutions (i.e., Yofi) enabled by Shopify. This will eliminate the time the Supreme team spends on maintaining their environment, allowing them to focus on new initiatives.

Impacts for the customer:

• ‍Improved Checkout Experience — the customer experience for Supreme should improve, especially if Supreme is planning to use Shop Pay. Shop Pay will centralize the checkout experience across Shopify stores allowing you to use your existing account to checkout from the store.‍
• Potential for Enhanced Bot Protection — though notorious for being a heavily botted platform, leveraging Shopify should allow Supreme more resources to dedicate to successfully preventing bots. Solely using Shopify Plus would be a mistake; hopefully, using these freed-up resources to creatively build a holistic bot mitigation solution would go a long way.‍
• Better Shipping Rates — ideally, through Shopify and the assumed cost savings from moving to the platform, Supreme can offer better international shipping rates.

Impacts for Supreme:

• ‍Improved TCO (total cost of ownership) — there should be a significant cost saving from moving to Shopify, as the Supreme team does not need to maintain their entire technology stack. Reducing this burden will help free up resources and allow them to reallocate them to other projects — better ways of preventing bots, more personalized experiences, and much more.‍
• Potential Less Accountability — this might sound silly, but since Supreme is moving to Shopify, they might have a “partner in crime” if an outage occurs. There will be more competition for their releases since almost every bot supports Shopify, but there will be some built-in protection from Shopify.

Will you have a better chance of winning a release?

Likely the question everyone cares about, and the answer depends, as Supreme has the opportunity to increase your chances of winning releases. This answer depends on Supreme continuing to innovate with creative solutions to prevent bots and prioritize loyal customers. If they rely on Shopify as a “silver bullet” for preventing bots, then the likelihood of you winning a raffle will decrease significantly.

Overall, while no platform is entirely immune to bot activity, the move to Shopify could help Supreme in its fight against bots by providing access to a range of built-in security features and tools and the ability to easily integrate third-party solutions.