Target

Target is the most complex site Refract supports: accounts, profiles, two kinds of cookies, and a harvester all working together against Shape, Target's anti-bot system. The guides below cover all of it. Read them in this order.

The guides

Building your setup (recommended task counts, accounts, monitor, task fields, login, cookie rules). Start here:

Target Setup Guide

Running drops (how Shape works, recommended settings, rate limits, cancellations). Required reading before your first drop:

Target Release Guide

Generating cookies with the in-bot harvester, which covers both login and add-to-cart cookies:

In-Bot (Shape Generation)

The browser extension is deprecated. It still connects to the bot, but it is no longer updated, we do not recommend it, and we do not provide guidance for it. Use in-bot harvesters: they are far ahead of the extension on Target.

The rules that never change

• Hype Product ON for every Shape-protected (high-demand) drop.

• 10 tasks does not cut it anymore. Target has become a submit order lottery: with the DCO (High Demand) rate limits, you have to cart a ton of tasks and spam submit order to push an order through, and only about 1% of carts turn into an order. The median running task count is 12, which is not competitive with how Target works now. The people hitting double digits in cook groups are running hundreds if not thousands of tasks.

• Windows: 30-50 tasks. Mac: 200+. The in-bot harvester has made big strides, and people are now running 200+ tasks without issues scaling, especially on macOS, local or on Mac servers. Local Windows gets flagged much faster, so stay in the 30-50 range there. Windows servers are still really bad for Target, so more accounts on a Windows server is not the answer.

• On drops, checking out is the hard part, not carting. Every bot has to keep submitting the order to force it through the rate limit. A task sitting on Submitting Order is doing exactly that. Leave it running.

• Shape blocked on login? Turn on Login with OTP (May pass login antibot better), then the same principles apply: take login really slowly, no Windows server, in-bot harvesters, different browser types, and resis for harvesting.

• Shape on a drop has an extremely low pass rate, for everyone. That is the nature of the site, not a broken setup.

• There is no one-size-fits-all fix for Shape blocks. Shape scores your whole setup together; what fixes one user's blocks does nothing for another's.

• About 3 cookies banked per running task. That is per task, so your cookie bank grows with your task count: 50 tasks need about 150, 200 tasks need about 600. What raises your flag risk is piling up far more than 3 per task, not running more tasks.

• macOS is best for Shape, then local Windows. Macs share a common hardware fingerprint, so they scale the furthest. A Mac mini server is a Mac mini in a datacenter and scales the same way; it only differs in needing proxies. Windows servers are heavily flagged, Windows VMs most of all, because their faked hardware is obvious to Shape.

• Accounts do not affect Shape blocks. Shape scores your device, browser, proxies, and cookie volume.

• Resis on tasks and harvesters, ISPs on the monitor. At 30-50 tasks on Windows or 200+ on a Mac, use residential proxies on tasks and especially on harvesters. ISPs stay on the monitor. Resis use data, but they have been passing Shape much better.

• Multi-SKU over duplicated groups. Duplicating a group doubles the cookies you need for the same accounts. To run more tasks, add more accounts.

• Defaults exist for a reason. Changing them is your call, but we have no better values to suggest; if we did, they would be the defaults.

• Everything known about Shape is in these guides. Tickets will not surface more.