When collecting commodity price data, you may encounter the problem of restricted access to websites. At this time, proxy is a super useful tool, it can help us simulate ordinary users online, cleverly avoid the site’s ‘wall of protection’, easy access to public pricing information, such as e-commerce platforms, commodity prices, competitors’ pricing strategy, and so on.
The role of proxy in obtaining pricing data
- Break through IP blocking and capture data efficiently
Some popular websites, in order to prevent malicious attacks or excessive access, will limit the number of visits to the same IP address. For example, an e-commerce platform stipulates that an IP can only access a maximum of 10 product pages per minute, and once the limit is exceeded, it will be temporarily blocked. Proxy is like putting a ‘mask’ on our network identity, which can hide the real IP and simulate the Internet requests of different regions and devices. By building a pool of proxy IPs and constantly switching IPs when accessing, we can quickly obtain a large amount of commodity price data. croxy is a trusted proxy provider with access to more than 80 million high-quality residential IPs in 195 territories around the world, powered by the world’s leading proxy network.
- Explore price differences in different regions
Some platforms such as air tickets and hotels often adjust prices according to the location of the user. At this point, we just need to switch the proxy IPs of different regions, such as changing the IP to the United States, Europe or Southeast Asia, we can see the real-time prices that local users see. In this way, we can compare and analyse the pricing strategies of different regions and discover the patterns and differences.
- Skip login verification and get data directly
Some wholesale websites or membership-based e-commerce platforms require logging in to an account or completing a CAPTCHA in order to view the price of a product, which brings a lot of trouble to data collection. Proxies can be used in conjunction with automation scripts to simulate the login process; or with the help of residential proxies to simulate the real user’s online environment, directly bypassing these restrictions and easily obtaining the desired price information.
Selection of proxy type and applicable scenarios
When using proxies to get data, it is important to choose the right type. Different proxies have their own characteristics and suitable scenarios:
Data centre proxy: Data centre proxies are the most common type of proxy IP, also known as server room IPs. it is low cost and responsive, but easily identified as bots. It is suitable for crawling data from small websites with weak anti-crawling mechanisms.
Residential proxy: Residential proxies are intermediaries that use IP addresses provided by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) rather than data centres. The main advantages of residential proxies are a high degree of anonymity and a low interception rate, but the price will be a little higher.
Mobile proxy: simulating the IP address of mobile phones, it can get the exclusive price of mobile APP, which is suitable for monitoring the price of mobile, but the traffic is limited and the cost is not low.
Rotary proxy: automatically change IP address for each request, especially suitable for high-frequency data capture, such as real-time monitoring of price changes, but it needs to be used with special tools, and the configuration is generally more complex.
Want to secretly monitor competitors’ prices, track market trends, or automate dynamic pricing? Proxies are your stealth weapon—letting you scrape price data at scale while staying undetected.
Here’s the step-by-step playbook to extract millions of price points without triggering bans—plus ready-to-use code to supercharge your scraping.
Step 1: Choose the Right Proxy Pool
Not all proxies are equal. To avoid detection, you need:
-Residential or mobile proxies (IPs from real devices, not data centers)
-Geolocation diversity (IPs from multiple countries to mimic real users)
-Automatic IP rotation (switch IPs after each request to prevent blocking)
Step 2: Automate Proxy Rotation (Stay Invisible)
Manually switching IPs is slow—automate it with Python + requests + proxy rotation.
|
import requests from itertools import cycle import random import time
# List of proxies (replace with your purchased proxies) PROXIES = [ “http://user:pass@proxy1.example.com:8080”, “http://user:pass@proxy2.example.com:8080”, “http://user:pass@proxy3.example.com:8080” ]
proxy_pool = cycle(PROXIES) # Infinite loop of proxies
def scrape_price(url): proxy = next(proxy_pool) headers = { |
| “User-Agent”: random.choice([
“Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64)”, “Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 15_0 like Mac OS X)”, “Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7)” ]), “Referer”: “https://www.google.com/” # Fake referral }
try: response = requests.get( url, proxies={“http”: proxy, “https”: proxy}, headers=headers, timeout=10 ) if response.status_code == 200: return response.text # Success! Parse price data here else: print(f”Blocked? Status: {response.status_code}”) return None except Exception as e: print(f”Proxy failed: {e}”) return None |
Step 3: Mimic Human Behavior (Avoid Detection)
Websites hate bots. To fly under the radar, you must:
Randomize delays between requests (time.sleep(random.uniform(1, 5)))
Rotate User-Agents (fake different browsers & devices)
Simulate mouse movements (if using Selenium)
Step 4: Extract & Store Price Data (Automate Everything)
With this valuable data, there are many practical uses for individuals, merchants and businesses. For individuals, you can use the data to quickly find the lowest prices on the web for your current favourite products, and also compare offers from different shops. For enterprises, the data is a great help in decision-making. Enterprises can analyse the data for industry research and market analysis, to determine the industry’s competitive landscape and consumer preferences. They can also adjust their purchasing plans for cost control by studying the prices of raw materials.
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