Throughout my career using proxies, it has come up time and time again that managing accounts on Amazon, eBay, and other retail sites can be difficult. With the right proxies, however, these sophisticated target sites can be easily accessed. The majority of retail sites use many different mechanisms in place to limit user’s actions but with the right software and proxy combination, these hardships are becoming a thing of the past.
My first piece of advice is to do your research before you begin. No point in getting your accounts going without first understanding how to keep them going. Bans can be detrimental to your business so why even leave that as a possibility. Start with finding the best proxies for eCommerce, understand what you want to use the proxies for and the best proxy type to do so.
The type of proxy you need has more to do with the actions you want to make compared to the target site you want to reach. A large pool of IPs that are continuously rotated is perfect for extracting data, but this same approach can easily ban an account that you want to manage. To maintain an account, you want to be using a static IP, assign one non-rotating IP to the account and continuously access that account from the same IP.
If you merely need lots of data and the quality is less important to you, a data center IP is more than sufficient and a much less expensive option. Data Center IPs can be purchased in large quantities for pennies compared to their residential counterparts but these proxies need to be maintained and monitored.
These less expensive proxies are normally derived from one subnet, which is one block of IPs, where the IP addresses themselves have similar numbers. Picture a street of houses, they will all have the same address, with the exception of the house number being different. Now when a system detects someone scraping or managing multiple accounts, for instance, they will block the entire street or subnet. This means that all the IPs you have purchased will not be usable. If you want to use data center proxies for scraping, make sure they come from a large number of subnets, meaning – make sure they are spread out from many neighborhoods.
Next, you want to have the right software. For example, CamelCamelCamel is an Amazon price tracking software that monitors the items you want and alerts you when the price drops. It provides a history of relevant prices as well as browsers add-ons. This feature is for tracking – if you are more interested in scraping pricing data than the data collection services offered by proxy providers for E-commerce are, in my opinion, the best way to do so.
