Last Updated on August 13, 2024 by theadmin

ECommerce Proxies for Data Scraping Will Avoid IP blocks!

Why scraping E-commerce is so popular?

Basically because it can make huge amounts of money if you do it right. The world’s biggest e-commerce sites like eBay have content and information that would take a huge investment to set up from scratch. Customer information, pricing details and all sorts of competitive intelligence is available for free from many e-commerce sources, although generally only for non-commercial use.

This information is literally gold dust and accurate real time data has many valuable uses. It can be used to populate sites, search applications, bots and a whole host of other commercial opportunities. However, not surprisingly the big websites won’t willingly supply you with his information to profit from. After all there’s little benefit to a site like an airline supplying real time prices to a third party who represent it in exchange for commission.

Most e-commerce sites will sometimes allow access to this online information but only through commercial agreements and hefty fees. If you’re careful though you can gain access to this information free of charge by using proxies designed to work with e-commerce sites. There are many hugely profitable sites which rely on data scraping from a variety of some sort of e commerce web site for virtually all their content. However IP blocks are inevitable unless you hide your access through decent proxies.

Why do you got blocked when scraping E-commerce site?

IP address

If you set up a website and it grabs all it’s information from another site then you’re going to get blocked unless you hide these requests. 10000’s of requests from a single IP address for information designed for end-consumers is going to get flagged real quick. If you’re using any sort of bot or automated API call then it will stop working very quickly if you get any sort of decent traffic.

The IP address is the simplest way to block these requests, after all a single IP address should only be requesting a small of amount of data. Customers don’t spend hours connected downloading information constantly.

Cookies

Cookie-based tracking is a scary thing. What may seem like harmless cookies to the untrained eye are actually little pieces of information revealing your every move online! It doesn’t matter what kind you have, which website or app you’re using — there’s something out there watching and waiting for an opportunity to take advantage of this data in ways that can be difficult if not impossible to reverse.

In the age of digital cookies, your favourite websites are following you around. Especially websites that require a persistent login feature – like Facebook and Gmail – store data about which pages you browse on their site in order to offer up targeted ads or suggestions for future visits.  This text based file can give you away very easily online if you’re not careful.

Request-headers & user-agent

These headers are used extensively within client detection and browser fingerprinting. They can expose all sorts of information which can harm user privacy and scuttle all attempts at anonymity and privacy from any connections. In short , browser fingerprinting is using these headers (and other information) to identity a new or existing visitor. This includes a user, device or user agent which can be identified by configuration settings or other characteristics which can be identified.

Blocking techniques

Generally blocking technique will be deployed as a defence against fraudulent transactions. However they will also be used to stop access to information and metadata too. There are many methods of blocking access to content but these are the primary types –

• IP Address and Protocol Based Blocking
• Packet Inspection Based Blocking
• URL Based Blocking
• Platform Based Blocking
• DNS Query Based Blocking

How do you avoid these blocking techniques?

For every blocking technique there is usually an equivalent method for avoiding it. A lot depends on the scale of access required and the mitigation techniques employed. However in this document we will consider the role of e-commerce proxies in avoiding IP address and protocol based detection and blocking. In truth this is the primary method and the most likely one to block access especially those involving data and information scraping. the next step where commercial transactions are involved have much more information to use in fingerprinting connections.

A proxy server will by default, respond to requests as if it were a local host. Suffice it to say that this means that the data mining will be unable to see the real IP addresses.

Communication between a browser and web-server is done using an HTTP protocol, such as when requesting web site content from a remote host (file transfer) or for support options in order information (handling HTTP options like cookies). One of these methods defines how servers can pass on additional information about themselves which is transparently communicated through an intermediary TCP connection.

A proxy server is essential for hiding the originating IP address and requesting computer/device. However if you’re making multiple requests then you must use either multiple proxies or more likely a proxy server with the ability to switch requests through multiple IP addresses. If you’re making a lot of requests these need to be ‘hidden’ across many IP addresses. You can’t run any number of automated requests on any scale without access to hundreds or possibly thousands of fresh IP addresses. It’s also important that these IP addresses look like real users so ideally they should not be from commercial based ranges. These are normally referred to as residential proxies.

Where can I get a large number of IPs?

The most common way to get a lot of IP addresses is through the use of proxies. Proxies allow you to connect via multiple connections at once, making it seem like for one session you have millions in number. To make this happen, all by proxy server does is redirect your real IP address connection request to someone else that has an open port on their computer. When the other person receives your connection request, they will do their best to respond and forward it along–making it look as if they’re connected and not you.

This used to be very expensive, because initially it required you own or reserve the IP addresses exclusively. You can do still do this with most providers but at a huge cost which makes most activities not viable. Fortunately now the new generation of providers have created all sorts of options of obtaining access to a huge number of residential IP addresses for short periods of time. these plans have various names but will normally be referred to as rotating proxies or rotating residential proxies.

What are Rotating Residential Proxies?

Instead of a proxy server being assigned one or two IP addresses which are used in all outgoing connections, rotating proxies work slightly differently. Each proxy has access to a large pool of available IP address which it can rotate between each connection. This means that the proxy will rarely use the same IP address consecutively and all users will have exclusive access (for each connection) to each address. Effectively this means a proxy can provide thousands of IP addresses to each of it’s users at a lower costs.

Rotating Residential proxies simply relate to the pool of addresses available to the proxies. In this case, the pool would consists entirely of residential classified IP addresses. There are lots of IP address options for rotating proxies now including ones that include mobile/4G addresses too.

Recommended Proxy Providers for E-Commerce Proxies

These new generation of e-commerce proxy providers have leveraged technology to supply thousands of IP addresses through gateway proxies which you can use easily for all sorts of activities. Some of the best include – IPBurger and Rotating Proxies all well known for supplying quality proxies and usable IP addresses.  They both have speciality server sections -so you can rent sneaker proxies or eBay proxies if you need them.

However if you want to use the method that most of the successful professionals use then there’s only one company to use –

Luminati/Bright Data – The World’s Largest Residential Proxy Network

The safest way to access any sort of e-commerce server repeatedly is to use a huge range of unconnected residential IP addresses from all over the world. This is what it looks like to a target website when ‘normal users’  connect and replicating this is the only guaranteed way to stay undetected. It’s also the only way to develop any sustainable business connected with this sort of access.

With out a provider who has access to millions of residential IP addresses (plus almost unlimited bandwidth) your access will be continuously blocked and filtered. If accounts are associated with the access too then this becomes even harder as they will need to be replaced or created too.

Luminati have now re-branded as Bright Data and have the largest pool of residential IP addresses on the planet. Their network is huge and the tools you can use to access them are both sophisticated and simple to use. What’s more they have the best support from technicians who know what they are doing and can step you through using their network to achieve your goal.

They’re not the cheapest, but they’re really not that expensive either and the quality means you won’t have to suffer expensive setbacks either.