Proxies are the driving force behind accomplished e-commerce businesses and their ability to outgrow and outmaneuver the competition.
You likely have an idea of the advantages proxies bring but are unsure which one to invest in. Here’s all you need to know!
How Can a Proxy Benefit Your Business?
Running an e-commerce business with care and foresight requires timely and accurate insights. You can’t get far if you don’t anticipate changes in demand or gauge consumer interest in a product.
The competition never sleeps, either. They’re constantly implementing their own strategies in a bid for higher market shares.
Collecting, analyzing, and interpreting the vast quantities of data e-commerce generates is the most effective means of creating actionable insights.
Market-conscious companies do this through web scraping, which harvests publicly available info on key metrics like SEO keyword efficiency, pricing histories, or customer sentiments.
Automated scraping needs to strike a balance between efficiency and maintaining human-like behavior. Sites may misinterpret web scraping as a malicious attack and ban the IP address from which the scraper is making its requests.
That’s where proxies and their ability to hide and rotate IP addresses come in.
You connect to a proxy provider’s server before accessing a website by using a proxy. The proxy substitutes your IP address for its own.
On the one hand, this maintains your anonymity. On the other, it means you can still conduct scraping and other operations even if the site bans one IP.
Proxies help with more than scraping, though. Competent providers have proxies in countries across the world, allowing you to get around geographical restrictions.
More importantly, e-commerce businesses use this feature to test the responsiveness of their websites in foreign markets.
Another invaluable use for proxies is checking for ad fraud. E-commerce businesses with a global presence need to ensure their ads are visible and appropriate anywhere but can’t do so without switching IP addresses.
Moreover, they may have social media marketing channels in different regions and need a local IP for each to maintain legitimacy.
Meanwhile, keep in mind that managing multiple accounts across different locations also comes with security risks. Your business likely relies on shared logins, which can make it vulnerable to threats like credential theft and unauthorized access, to name a few.
Combine proxies with strong password practices – such as using passkeys instead of traditional credentials – to strengthen security and prevent cyber attacks.
Which Proxy Types are Useful in E-commerce?
Proxies come in several types, and which one you should go for depends on your use case. Let’s explore them all in more detail to help you decide.
Residential proxies
Scraping can be tricky, especially if you’re trying to do it on a website with a low tolerance for unexpected behavior. If a high success rate is more important to you than a high data volume, residential proxies are the answer.
Residential proxies rely on real IP addresses obtained from internet service providers in your target country. Websites have a much harder time classifying activities by such IPs as scraping, which minimizes disconnects and downtime.
The data cost is higher, and the average speed is slower compared to data center proxies. Still, residential proxies pull through where others falter, especially ones with rotating IPs.
Datacenter Proxies
The main difference between residential and datacenter proxies is their IP address origin. Whereas the former uses ISP-assigned IPs, the latter relies on IP pools assigned by data centers, often to more customers.
Datacenter proxies are an excellent choice if you need to extract lots of data from a forgiving source. They’re cheaper than the residential variant and offer the fastest results. However, some sites will recognize and ban data center IPs outright.
Mobile proxies
Most users now browse the web on mobile. That means e-commerce store owners need to optimize their sites accordingly and faithfully simulate the mobile user experience to make appropriate changes.
Mobile proxies offer high anonymity and low detection chances while enabling e-commerce companies to check how their website and ad campaigns behave on mobile in any part of the world.
Not being optimized for web scraping and slower overall speeds are mobile proxies’ only drawbacks.
How to Choose the Right Provider and Proxy Type
Defining what you hope to get out of a proxy will help steer your choices. Datacenter proxies will work well if you need high volumes of data at cost. Conversely, residential proxies are best for specialized research that needs to proceed without a hitch.
They’re also great for testing your campaigns. Unless you’re optimizing for mobile, which is when you should opt for a mobile proxy instead.
Avoid free proxies regardless of the scope and nature of your projects. They’re slow, unreliable, and may even compromise the security or privacy of gathered data.
Speed and scalability should be high on your priorities list. After all, the proxy needs to keep up with changes in demand to remain viable. All providers will cite excellent uptimes as a pro, but check user and expert reviews to verify their claims with evidence.
The provider you choose needs to take anonymity and data protection seriously. They should provide a means of access control like authentication to keep unauthorized persons away.
Sophisticated uses like data scraping also require excellent support you can depend on to answer any technical questions or swiftly handle issues.
Conclusion
Data powers successful decisions in the e-commerce landscape. The worst thing you could do is not take advantage of this; the second worst would be not to leverage proxies to make data gathering and analysis efficient and straightforward.
