Sneakers n Stuff is a Swedish retailer with locations in Sweden, Germany, France, UK and most recently the USA. They are a top tier store and offer every major release from Adidas and Nike including getting various collaborations with various manufacturers most notably the SNS x Adidas Datamosh and the SNS x Adidas 4D Runner.
Ease of entry
As is becoming very popular SNS have a dedicated ‘Upcoming section’ to make it easy to see what can be expected and what raffles will be opening up soon. The actual entry process itself seems well put together with no account required you can whizz through and enter very quickly, although it does seem a bit pointless having to click on the shoe in the release section, go to a product page and then go to the raffle. I feel clicking on the shoe should go right to the raffle.What is great is that SNS offer raffles for Online users and in-store collection in one place meaning you don’t have to hunt around to check which raffle you are entering as some stores have separate pages for online and in-store which does get confusing. What I do think is pretty bad is not being able to cancel your entry while the raffle is still open, this should be basic functionality in case people come into financial issues during the entry period or you win from somewhere else which retailers should be expecting for highly sought after releases. There was a recent issue where SNS accidentally said they were getting the Yeezy 350 v2 Reflective pairs but then changed and said they were the non-reflective a few hours later, meaning loads of people entered for a shoe they didn’t want and SNS could not cancel the entries. This needs to be fixed.https://twitter.com/sneakersnstuff/status/1075405388630159362Where the entry process seems to fall flat sometimes is payment authorisation which is done during the initial entry, more frequently than not users are complaining of failed payment methods when raffles initially releases, so sometimes it’s best to wait an hour or so for the rush of traffic to blow over. Which can be annoying if you are the type who likes to get an early entry and move on.
The Odds
By offering online and collection raffles for almost every release those who are within range of a SNS store can get better odds by banking on most people being lazy and going for the online postage raffle (which are world wide so expect low odds for those).But what SNS have started doing recently is that those who enter for raffles and take L’s get exclusive access on uncollected pairs which is I think is a great idea instead of just putting pairs up for FCFS that bots eat up. I think more retailers should follow this idea to give users that second chance of a win.
Views on bots/ re-selling
SNS have no public opinions on bot’s or re-selling pairs. But the way they release some pairs through FCFS randomly on their site is basically just catered to bots and monitor groups who always get the scoop. I feel like that were sitting on a goldmine that they totally threw away. For their first Datamosh release they held a FCFS but through a livestream where the URL was displayed and users had to frantically type the URL in as fast as possible. This at the time was the release I saw the most amount of wins coming from collectors before OffSpring, it was a really fun method, got them engagement and reduced botting/ scripts. I think they should consider brining it back.
Overall Raffle Experience Rating - 3/5
On the whole the SNS experience is pretty bog standard, some very basic solutions to try to stop mass entry and the odds can be very good if you are local to an SNS store. I feel with not too much extra work they could easily become one of the top raffle sites if they spent some time innovating some of the great methods they have already tried but ditched.
Enjoy reading this? Check out our other raffle reviews, or upcoming sneaker releases.
