As you are here, you’ve probably come over the term “residential proxies” and their benefits for eCommerce businesses. In this quick guide, we covered everything you need to know about this type of proxy and its uses specifically for eCommerce purposes.
What Is a Residential Proxy?
Residential proxies are real device IPs issued by real internet service providers to let you assign your device to an IP address different from your actual IP address. Using a residential proxy, you can access websites as if you were a real resident of a country you are connected from.
Use Cases of Residential Proxies for eCommerce
Residential proxies have a wide range of uses for eCommerce business:
- Ad verification & brand protection – using a residential proxy, you can view your brand’s web pages through the eyes of real users from different countries. This lets you verify target ads displayed on your pages and block ads that seem suspicious or infringe on your brand security in any way.
- Web scraping & marketing – residential proxies with rotating IPs let you effectively scrape competitor websites to analyze large batches of competitors’ marketing info.
- Access to restricted markets – ordering from some marketplaces can be impossible if you are not local. For example, if you encounter blocked marketplaces in China, you can use a dedicated Chinaproxy to bypass restrictions.
- Price research – you can use residential proxies to research and compare prices for goods across multiple international markets and determine the optimal price for the goods on your online marketplace.
- Sneaker site protection bypassing – if your eCommerce business is based on sneaker copping, you know that the original sneaker sellers restrict users from purchasing multiple pairs from the same IP to prevent resellers from getting all the sneakers to sell them to real people for a higher price. With a residential proxy, you can bypass these restrictions and acquire as many pairs as you need.
- SMM (social media management) – all major social networks are monitoring and restricting the use of multiple social media accounts from the same IPs. With a residential proxy, you can mimic using different devices and use multiple accounts for marketing risk-free.
Types of Residential Proxies
There are only 2 types of residential proxies, so they’re easy to remember:
- Dedicated proxies – this type of residential proxy allows you to use a single IP address that will be available only to you. This is often used for managing multiple social media accounts and hosting paid buyer surveys.
- Rotating (backconnect) proxies – this proxy type is set to switch your IP address at specific time intervals or every time you start a new session. This way, your actual IP address becomes impossible to track as you always connect via a new address from your provider’s address pool. This proxy type is often used for web scraping, SMM, sneaker copping, ticket copping, and price research.
Time to Benefit!
Now that you know enough about all the benefits and uses of residential proxies for eCommerce, you can employ them to give your online business a performance and security boost. It’s a great way to stay ahead of your competitors.
