Price Monitoring Proxies: A Deep Dive into Business Solutions
If you are planning to enter the E-commerce industry, it is vital to ensure you set the right prices for your products or services. With over 26.5 million E-commerce stores operating globally, you have a wealth of pricing information to collect and plan accordingly.
Fortunately, data scraping helps businesses gather price-related information and set reasonable rates for their customers. But at times, website owners use different techniques to make it difficult for their competitors to scrape data for performing price monitoring.
In this section, we’ll discuss the main difficulties of price monitoring with scraping and how proxies can prove to be helpful in this aspect. Later, we’ll highlight the three best proxy servers for price monitoring.
Main Difficulties of Price Monitoring with Web Scraping
Online price monitoring can be challenging due to many reasons. Following are the main difficulties of collecting price information that scrapers face during web scraping:
Anti-Scraping Measures
Many websites employ sophisticated anti-scraping techniques to protect their pricing data from competitors. These measures include, but are not limited to, CAPTCHAs, IP bans, rate-limiting, user-agent detection, user behavioral analysis, and fingerprinting. Such measures are technically challenging to overcome, making it difficult to collect price data without getting detected.
Real-time Updates
Prices on websites can vary often due to various factors, such as changes in demand, inventory levels, competitors’ prices, etc. Due to this dynamic nature, it is imperative to perform real-time or frequent data scraping. This can be difficult, as well as resource-intensive, because the frequency of price fluctuations indicates that data gathered almost all the time already gets outdated.
Location-Dependent Pricing
It is common for prices to be different for different geographical regions due to some factors, like regional pricing plans, tax rates, shipping costs, and more. In order to collect accurate prices, scraping solutions have to appear to be from different locations. This increases the level of complexity in the entire scraping process.
Dynamic Pricing
A number of digital sellers use dynamic pricing, which involves changing the prices of products in real time depending on demand changes, location, season, etc. This increases the variability in the pricing data and makes it challenging for scrapers to acquire consistent data.
Complex Page Structures
Pages on online shopping websites show lots of product-related information other than prices. This includes product descriptions and specifications, ratings, customer reviews, and related products. Advanced scraping methods should be used to identify and collect the required information to handle such complex page structures.
How Proxies Help Solve Price Monitoring Difficulties
Brands can collect useful data using proxy servers and make informed price-related business decisions. Here is how proxies can help handle problems scrapers face during price monitoring:
Bypassing Anti-Scraping Techniques
The use of proxies allows users to get around almost all anti-scraping techniques followed by website owners in order to prevent access to their content. With IP rotation, proxies can bypass CAPTCHA challenges and distribute the frequency of requests among multiple addresses. Proxy servers can also change the HTTP headers sent with every request to the server.
Geo-Spoofing
Proxies allow users to select IP addresses from the proxy pool during the scraping process. They allow users to switch IPs from various locations across the world frequently. This way, proxy servers can help overcome geo-restrictions imposed by the sites and perform price monitoring from different regions.
Scraping at High Volume
When a scraper is used to perform large-scale scraping, there is a high chance that the target site might identify its presence. A scraping bot may only access a site at a certain time of the day. This puts it at a risk of getting detected and banned as a result.
However, proxy servers offer next-level privacy and anonymity, making it easier to scrape websites and avoid bans.
Best Proxies for Price Monitoring
Datacenter Proxies
Datacenter proxy servers are the optimum choice for price monitoring. These proxies use IP addresses from data center proxy pools and third-party cloud service vendors. Those who buy datacenter proxies for price monitoring can benefit from its cost-effectiveness, reliability, and high speed.
However, these proxies may be ineffective to get around anti-scraping techniques since they are easily detectable. But you can get good results if you buy datacenter proxies and use them with CAPTCHA-solving services and user agent rotation.
Residential Proxies
Residential proxies use IP addresses associated with ISPs and linked to actual home devices. These proxies are less likely to be detected and banned, thereby proving to be useful for accessing geo-restricted content. However, residential proxy servers are slow in speed and less reliable and can still experience rate-limiting problems.
Mobile Proxies
Mobile proxy servers use IPs associated with mobile devices having cellular network connections, which works great for collecting location-based pricing data. However, these proxies are more expensive than other types. Also, its limited availability makes it challenging to perform large-scale price monitoring.
Summary
Without the help of proxy servers, it often gets difficult to scrape price-related data since websites use several anti-scraping methods to prevent access to their content. But with datacenter, residential, and mobile proxies, you can access geo-blocked platforms and retrieve location-based and dynamic prices to gain a competitive edge.
Disclosure: This is a collaborative post and the author’s views here do not necessarily reflect those of the blog owner.