It’s not easy keeping up with the proxy market, anything you learn can quickly become out of date. Sometimes the situation can change in a week, sometimes even days. I have been using proxies in one way or another for over twenty years now, and the pace has accelerated even in the last few months. For those of us who use proxies primarily for internet marketing and e-commerce then it’s almost a full time job in itself. Picking decent proxies which allow you to operate multiple identities on various platforms are literally the key to success.
Choosing proxy providers is especially difficult as the right ones almost always vary depending on the task. Sometimes you can cut corners, but for specialist requirements like ticketing proxies to use with ticket sites that tactic rarely works anymore. Like anyone I tend to look for a bargain and you’ll often find a very cheap proxy provider which will work great on a particular ticket site for a little while. Unfortunately if you want to make money consistently then you need to find someone long term with private proxies to provide a decent service.
In fact, nowadays I tend to avoid the value end of the market, simply because the cheaper ones tend to be rubbish. What’s more a poor proxy setup can actually cost you more than money. If you’ve ever lost a bunch of valuable social media accounts then you’ll know what I mean. Quality is important, there’s little point using great servers with unlimited bandwidth to access ticket sites if all the proxies are using blacklisted IPs. If you’re shelling out on a ticketing bot too, then using a poor quality tickets proxy is doubly pointless.
This fluid market doesn’t help reduce the confusion though and if you’re looking for proxies for a specific task then it can be even more difficult to make the right choice. There’s hundred of sites where you can buy proxies but many are completely worthless. The problem is that the IP addresses assigned to these proxies are often very low quality. They’ve been used and abused for years and are on loads of blacklists and spam registers. Using these sort of addresses will end up with blocks, bans or failed transactions.
But hey they’re cheap!!
So let’s take an example of a task and what sort of ticketing proxies you should be looking for – using proxies to buy tickets online. For pleasure or profit. Well mainly profit !
Ticketing Proxies for Sale
Buying proxies that work with Ticketmaster and some of the other major ticket e-commerce sites can be tricky. However if you get it right, then you’re on the road to a substantial income which can be produced without ever leaving your house (or even your pyjamas!) or needing an extra internet connection. Sounds cool huh.
So let’s drill down a little into the component of a Ticketmaster proxy for example although the requirements are similar for most ticketing websites. The essence of this niche is to buy as many tickets as possible for popular events and then resell them. You need proxies to hide your multiple identities, but what’s the key to achieving this? There are generally two primary factors in buying ticket proxies.
- Who you’re trying to hide from.
- How they detect multiple/hidden users?
So if we’re trying to make a business reselling multiple tickets then it’s vital that our proxies work well with ticket websites like Ticketmaster. Whether we use them manually or via an automated ticket bot, using the right proxies is probably the most important factor for success. So often we see people who have spent thousands of dollars on software and ticket bots but fail dismally. Normally it’s because they have failed to invest in decent proxies that simply won’t work properly with the site. Proxies are certainly far more important than Bots in most e-commerce transactions.
First of all let’s focus on the single most important factor of what makes a proxy work or not. That’s of course the IP address that it uses to connect with – the proxy address is what you connect with. The most advanced proxy in the world, sitting on the fastest server will be next to useless if it’s using IPs banned by your target. Many companies who sell proxies will get the basic configuration right, but without the right IP address then they’re worthless.
So back to our questions, first of all who we’re trying to hide from? Well if we’re trying to buy tickets then it’s obviously the companies who provide these. Simply the companies who you’re trying to buy your tickets from – could be any of a number of firms like the following:
- Ticketmaster
- Ticketclub
- Ticket Fly
- Evenue
- AXS
Our proxy server must use IPs which can be used on these platforms. Obviously this means that the proxy pool can’t contain addresses that are blacklisted or marked as spam, as connections made with these will not be allowed. Worst still your accounts and cards might be flagged too, particularly if the IP exists on a fraud list. This is why you’ll sometimes see ‘Ticketmaster Proxies’ which simply have IP addresses that are guaranteed to work with that platform. There’s nothing essentially different about these proxy packages apart from the IP address.
Find Residential Proxies for Sale in the Right Neighbourhood
So if your proxies have IP addresses which work perfectly on your selected Ticketing sites, then you’re half way there. Except most e-commerce sites look for a little more than just basic fraud and blacklisting, especially when they’re trying to actively prevent these secondary markets occurring. For many platforms there are other factors which may be checked like these –
- Location – is the addresses of your IPs registered where you expect your audience to be based. For instance trying to buy tickets for a Bruce Springsteen concert in San Diego from a block of Chinese or Ukrainian IP address will look very suspicious and will almost certainly fail. Ticket proxies need to have legitimate location addresses – so US Ticketmaster purchases should be ideally from US IP address ranges.
- Classification – IP addresses can be classified by type too. Standard home users will all have residential IPs assigned from their ISP. If your proxy has lots of datacentre registered IPs this could cause transactions to fail simply because it looks like you’re using proxies.
- Suspicious Ranges – real customers don’t connect from sequential IPs, that just looks wrong.
- Mobile IP addresses – these are good as many of us buy tickets from our smart phones and mobile devices, however many cheap 4g proxies use address ranges from different countries (see location above).
As you can see it can get complicated, but those who succeed in ticket scalping or arbitrage cover these bases. If you find a decent proxy provider with some knowledge and skills in providing these sort of Ticketing proxies then it shouldn’t be a problem. It’s generally way better to spend a couple more dollars buying the right service than failing dismally with something cheap though.
So here’s a couple of suggestions, firstly the premium option for those who value certainty and don’t mind paying a little more for it.
Luminati are simply the biggest and safest option for the large majority of proxy related tasks. Their network dwarfs anything else available largely because they were the pioneer of curating and supplying residential proxy services. They also have a hugely impressive control panel called the proxy manager where you can specify IP rotation through their rotating proxies exactly as you need and how they are distributed.
Remember residential IPs are assigned to normal, ordinary home users. So your connection and hence logon credentials while using one of these addresses will look completely legitimate. What’s more the Luminati interface allows you to pick range spreads and exact geo-targeting. So you can route your traffic through the same US city as the concert is being held in for example. This looks good for multiple connections but also speeds up the transactions which is vital for oversubscribed events.
Luminati operate a very professional service and you’ll be assigned an account manager to help with configuration and general advice of your ticketing proxies. They aren’t the cheapest but are not unreasonable.
Ticketmaster Proxies for Sale Which the Professionals Use
Here’s my other option for using if you want quality proxies offering particularly residential IP addresses.
They’re called IPBurger and again operate at the more professional sector of the proxy market. They were one of the pioneers of residential proxies and are one of the few companies to offer country, city and state level targeting. Their network consists of approximately 60 million residential IPs so you can get access to all the private residential proxies you need. They have a huge infrastructure and a dedicated support line, which can be vital if you’re operating from a different time zone than your target market.
Great rotating proxies, well configured with an easy to use back end interface. They don’t quite have the configuration options of Luminati but are substantially cheaper and often it’s more than sufficient. The residential IP addresses I’ve used have been first class and are suitable for all sorts of internet tasks from marketing to SEO and research. You won’t find better ticketing proxies for sale than these two companies.
