The e-commerce boom is ushering in data-driven market research as a cutting-edge tool for most businesses in the sector. However, some websites use tools that can detect suspicious data gathering activities. When they do, they ban, block, or misinform the rivals to maintain their lead. To avoid detection, e-commerce businesses use residential proxies.
What Makes Residential Proxies Suitable for E-commerce Activities?
Residential proxies, unlike other types, are IP addresses issued by ISPs to homeowners. As a result, they are tied down to a physical home address. Most websites trust them, making them suitable for e-commerce activities without triggering security alarms. Below are their uses in the sector.
Web Scraping and Marketing
Data-driven solutions to drive up your e-commerce sales and monitor your competition require a lot of data. A residential proxy happens to be one of the best options for web scraping. It lets you extract and harvest data while hiding your location and identity.
Providers offering rotating IPs allow you to collect competitors’ data without detection. As a result, you can analyze their activities and develop superior marketing strategies to take up their piece of the pie.
Brand Protection
Intellectual property is highly valuable in the e-commerce space. It allows businesses to thrash their competitors and maintain market leadership using their inventions. Residential proxies prevent the unauthorized use of your brand’s assets and copyrights, protecting your intellectual property.
Ad Verification
Residential proxies can deliver a real user’s view of your brand’s web pages from various geo-locations. Therefore, you can monitor and control ads displayed on your web pages, blocking suspicious ones. They let you watch and avoid ad placement with security infringement, ensuring better control of your site.
Access To Geo-restricted Markets
You are more likely to encounter difficulties in foreign markets when sourcing cheap and reliable products for your e-commerce business. Residential proxies let you access the selling platforms as a local resident. For instance, you can utilize Taiwanese residential proxies when sourcing products from Taiwan for your online shop.
Social Media Management (SMM)
Most social media networks restrict the use of multiple accounts from the same IP. Static and dedicated residential proxies allow you to manage multiple profiles on the same device by mimicking different devices. As such, you can conduct social media market research without limitations. You can also undertake social listening thanks to automation tools on residential proxies.
Price Research
Product prices vary on different websites. You might want to compare prices to source the cheapest product in the market that will increase the profit margins of your e-commerce business. Residential proxies allow you to access goods in the international markets and compare prices before purchasing.
You can employ web crawlers and bots to scan various online stores without detection and gather pricing data for comparison. For instance, newly released gaming consoles are usually in high demand, skyrocketing their prices. Pairing residential proxies with bots will let you stock up on these high-demand items for your e-commerce business without raising alarms.
Monitor Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs)
Search engine optimization (SEO) increases your website visibility, enabling more people to access your products or services. Residential proxies allow you to incorporate multiple tools to track your website performance on various search engines.
You can monitor your competitors, check the performance of specific keywords, run certain queries and see the results on SERPs. Residential proxies give you undetected access to websites you want to analyze for market research. You can assume the identity and location of a website’s typical customers, preventing it from classifying you as its competitor.
Website Testing
Any e-commerce business’ success relies on its website. That means site optimizations are essential for such companies to remain competitive. Extensive website testing is paramount before launching it for public access.
Residential proxies let you pose as users from various countries to conduct unrestrained and effective website testing. Rotating residential proxies are especially useful in this regard because they allow you to use alternating IPs to avoid flagging.
Conclusion
The unique capabilities that residential IP addresses hold make them most suitable for e-commerce. You can use them to pretend to be an actual resident of another country to access various content for market research. As such, you can make data-based decisions more effectively.
