E-commerce is a form of business that exploded during the last decade. More & more
customers are buying online with confidence, taking advantage of lower shipping rates &
faster deliveries.
With a smartphone, (almost) anyone can order in a few minutes a pair of sneakers with a
minimum effort. You don’t need to live in a big city or to have a local sneakers store.
The eternal problem though, is the release of products with a very high demand.
This is how Raffles got into Sneakers Market.
What are raffles?
Raffles (also called draws) are an answer to distribute fairly high demand products to
customers.
Most of the time, they simply are a form to fill in order to enter the lottery.
Just to clarify, if you are not familiar with this system of distribution, whenever you sign up for
a raffle and you get selected as a winner, you don’t actually win the product but rather have
the right to buy it at retail price.
These days the raffles are being used by a lot of industries for limited editions & very high
demand products including Sneakers, Apparel, NFTs, Video games, Watches & more.
Let’s try to dig deeper in this system that changed the sneakers distribution for the past
decade.
Why sneakers shops use them ?
Imagine tens of thousands of people in front of a physical store waiting to buy a pair of
sneakers : how would you handle it ?
If you never saw these long lines also called ‘camps’, well they used to be real back in the
days, lasting sometimes for days outside.
After a few scandals around the world with people fighting & getting injured, sneakers
stores decided to implement a new lottery system for these limited releases.
This new system brings security & equal opportunity to all customers ready to give their
money instantly to own the coveted product.
How do Raffles work & what are the different types ?
Raffles can apply either online or in store and be of different types: social raffles,
application raffles & more. Here is a guide of the different scenarios you will encounter for
Kicks.
Application raffles
A lot of stores decided to create a brand new application to handle the hype releases.
Understanding the importance of mobile use these days, a dedicated App is a quick and
easy answer for their users to sign up in a few seconds.
It took time but more & more sneakers stores invested in this, looking at this as a bigger
opportunity to stay close to their customers and community: sending push notifications,
shopping directly via the App, analyzing the navigation for personal recommendations,
etc.
Not every retailer can afford such an IT project though. It can be very expensive for a small
business and the application must be maintained in time.
Among the most famous raffle applications we can mention : SNKRS app (Nike Store),
Confirmed (adidas), Sneakersnstuff, Size?, Footpatrol…
Web forms
A lot of stores use their website directly to gather the subscriptions of the raffles. Customers
are invited to sign up via a Web form generally available from the product page. External
solutions like Google forms or Type forms are still used sometimes to save all this data.
When this type of raffles stay open for a long time (like 1 week), they are often attacked by
bots trying to enter as many times as possible to increase their chance.
On the store side, these raffles require a lot of time & processing to randomly choose
the winners & communicate.
Live raffles
Live raffles may be the less common type of raffles because it requires an infrastructure
that can support a large traffic at the same time.
Live raffles will start at a random or scheduled time and will be open for a very limited time.
SNKRS live raffles for example last generally 15 minutes and then at the end of this period,
the system will automatically pick up random winners and deliver the results almost instantly
to the customers.
Live ones are possibly where you have the best chance to cop as long as the stock is good
because people have to be on time and it prevents bots from entering 100000 times in the
interval of time. But once again it requires more technical skills in the background to be
operational.
Social raffles
Social raffles had a huge success especially at the beginning of the raffle wave.
It consists in asking your community to complete a list of tasks on one or several social
media to be part of the lottery.
Most of the time, people are asked to tag several friends to get the post viral or even to
repost a picture. A lot of accounts use this trend at first to catch more followers at every
release.
However, it became boring for a lot of people as your social feed started to look like a lottery
game, especially if you were entering like 10 social raffles for every hyped release.
It is certainly the most effortful version of the raffles which is not a good point for the final
customer. It’s also the most discouraging one because you can see with transparency the
number of comments or retweets etc. I personally avoided these types of raffles as soon as I
saw thousands of comments.
Payment system : Do we have to pay when entering sneaker raffles ?
Now that we know all these types of raffles, the next question is : Do you have to pay for
sneaker raffles ?
The answer is: it depends. The payment system (in case you win of course) is different
according to the retailer.
Case number 1 : pre-authorization of the payment at the same time as you filled the
form of the raffle. You are asked to provide your payment details as well as your
shipping & billing address. Most of the time it won’t actually take your money but just
check the authorization.
Case number 2 : You don’t provide any payment details but if you win a unique link
will be sent out to you to complete the purchase. Either a basket link where you will
need to log in or a PayPal link.
Case number 3 : When brands also want to sell a part of the stock in physical stores
for high demand sneakers, they open special raffles to win the right to collect (and
buy) the product in-store at a particular address. It allows the local business to be
part of the loop & the customer to get the product directly on the release date.
In this second case, you still get the choice afterwards to buy the shoe or not, which is good
as a customer but the store will need to re-draw the uncollected pairs among the losers or
sell them later on a First come first serve basis. This can be a lot of effort for small stores
that don’t want to spend so much time on each release.
In the first case, if you enter more than 10 raffles for a 200€ product and you win three times,
you will automatically spend 600€ even if you don’t want to. In reality, it does not happen
often on very high demand sneakers but theoretically the customer could suffer from a
big spending if the demand is lower than expected.
How to Find, Enter, and Win Sneakers Raffles ?
How to increase your chances of
winning ?
Tips you need to know.
If you are chasing a new pair of sneakers for your collection, we recommend you to
(Manufacturer code/Style code) in the search at the top right for a quick result.
After that, just navigate to the Raffles Tab and check the list with direct links.
You will have to enter each raffle separately before the time closure. As seen before,
according to the retailer you might need to install dedicated applications to register.
Remember that most sneakers raffles are open & live before the release date (except in
case of late deliveries) and closes generally before the official drop time. So don’t try to
sign up 2 hours before the release.
Be aware that each retailer is handling the raffles with its own process. Time frames are
often really different these days.
There are not many tips that will result in win on every drop. But if you are really after
a release with very high demand then you should enter as many raffles as you possibly can.
On top of that, you can ask friends to do the same for you, maybe only on the
ones with the minimum effort.
Last tip: entering sneakers raffles takes time. To be efficient & strategic, you might want to
enter all the raffles at once, generally 48h or 24h minimum before the drop.
Are raffles doing their job ?
Is it worth entering them ?
So does the raffle system solve the problem of high demand products ? Well, the main issue
will stay the fact that there are more losers than winners. This is hyped products by design.
However, Raffles are an answer that really try to make it more fair for the sneaker
community. Like any new system, older systems adapted themselves to exploit it. It clearly
did not solve the bot issues (it may even be worse on certain types of raffles as they are
open for a week sometimes) and asked the stores new effort to stay in the game.
I really think it is a good way to secure a pair of sneakers in advance if you are sure to
cop & not available on the release day for example. I still think customer loyalty should be
more rewarded and that the system can be improved with all the experience we have
from the past years.
I also think that many products can be sold again on a first come first serve basis as we see
a lot of full size run dropping late at retailers lately. Each store has its own strategy &
customers vision though, there is no best choice here.
Upcoming sneaker raffles
To get all updates about upcoming sneakers raffles, visit our dedicated
Raffle open page.
Browse in real time the current Sneakers raffles with direct links & countdowns.
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