When you own a business, there are only two ways you can go: up or down. Stagnation is not an option and going down doesn’t sound great. E-commerce business owners know how difficult it is to keep a business afloat on their own. Those that have managed to take their business to the next level have discovered the importance of residential proxies.
Residential proxies are linked to actual residential addresses. This means they are hard to ban. Users can effectively hide their IP address, scrape data anonymously from the web and access geographically blocked content. To learn more about residential proxies besides their usefulness for ecommerce, you should dig in deeper into different content, but for now let’s look at how residential proxies are changing e-commerce.
Market Research
An ecommerce business cannot survive without market intelligence. Data-gathering or web scraping has become an important part of any successful business marketing strategy. This process allows businesses to extract valuable information in large amounts from various competitor websites.
For individual business owners and even those with teams of experts, it’s impossible to perform an effective web scraping process without help. Doing it manually would take a lot of time and money. Residential proxies are the main elements required to perform web scraping effectively. They allow businesses to scrape other websites anonymously. Valuable information from this process includes:
- Customer reviews
- Social media data
- Website changes
- Product releases
Price Scraping
The competition in ecommerce is ruthless. It’s basically survival for the fittest. Businesses must always stay ahead of the game by setting the right prices for their products, to maximize sales. How do they do this? By constantly checking what the competition is doing, also known as price scraping.
Competitor businesses keep changing their prices to increase sales. It’s important to find out why and monitor their price changes. However, it’s an overwhelming job. That’s where residential proxies come in. Their job is to crawl a large part of the internet and quickly provide crucial pricing information from the competition. This results in creating an effective pricing strategy.
SEO Monitoring
Getting to and staying at the top of search engines is an important goal for businesses today. It gives businesses the visibility they need to increase traffic and subsequently sales. Hiring a professional SEO company and purchasing SEO tools costs businesses a small fortune. Many ecommerce businesses have figured out that they can optimize their websites without an SEO agency.
Residential proxies are changing e-commerce by helping businesses with these tasks:
- Performing site audits
- Obtaining the best ranking keywords
- SEO competition analysis
- Tracking ranks
- Finding competitors’ common search queries
Travel Fare Aggregation
Businesses that aggregate travel agency offers or run flight search engines need a huge amount of accurate and updated data in a short period of time. As these businesses grow and scale, they’ll need even more data. The sources of this data include:
- Airlines
- Travel agencies
- Railway companies
- Hotels
- Bus companies
Sometimes these sources will block IP addresses trying to access their sites. However, they can’t block residential IPs because they mimic human behavior with their rotation capability. Residential proxies help these aggregators obtain accurate information on travel prices, timetables, and other relevant data.
Brand Protection
Huge brands like Ray-Ban and Gucci always experience violations of their brands. The violators hide behind these big brand names with fake, unoriginal products. You might be a small brand, but you’re just as susceptible to a violation as the big ones.
Residential proxies help businesses find out if someone is violating your brand. They may have even blocked this particular content for users in your location, but with residential proxies, you’ll still be able to find out and take them down.
Ad Verification
Ad fraud has hit the online advertising market hard. In fact, the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) created a global task force to control this growing problem. Fraudsters have found a way to channel artificial traffic and clicks to inflate and alter impressions. This means that ads aren’t reaching the targeted audience and businesses are losing lots of money – advertising is not exactly cheap.
Residential proxies are changing this. Instead of shying away from promoting your business online, use a residential proxy network for ad verification. This allows e-commerce businesses to reach their targeted audience and make sure that the ads are on the right websites. With residential proxies, businesses can improve ad performance, detect fraud, and anonymously check advertisers’ landing pages.
Conclusion
Ecommerce business owners that are not using residential proxies are doing too much on their own and subsequently losing lots of money. Residential proxies are changing e-commerce and taking businesses to the next level.
The ability to perform market research, ad verification, brand protection, SEO monitoring, price scraping, and many other tasks anonymously and within record time is a recipe for e-commerce business success. This can only be done effectively with residential proxies.
