What works today might not work tomorrow. That is why ecommerce businesses trying to make a dent in the competition, should not be focused on it. They should instead make objective and valuable decisions. In this article, we intend to provide the definitive answer to the question that may have been bugging you for some time: "How can proxies help ecommerce?"
First, they should be able to protect their enterprise and its sensitive information from theft and breach of data. An ecommerce company should also think about effective security practices to protect its business intelligence, conduct research on its competitors, and safeguard its privacy (this is discussed below).
Without considering and adopting measures for effective security measures, it can create serious problems for both small and large online businesses. However, ecommerce proxies can offer you many business solutions. They are discussed below.
Benefit #1: Competitor Research
As you noticed, the internet has changed many things that we are used to, such as how people do online and mobile shopping. With so many competitors, it is very difficult to reach the number 1 spot.
As a result, competitor research, including web scraping, has become even more important. This is because it helps you to gather data about the competition, so you can make better decisions. However, it is not easy to do.
Large, high-ranking ecommerce websites use advanced techniques, such as flagging or blocking IP addresses, skewing the data or presenting CAPTCHA, to shield their business from website scraping.
In order to scrape valuable competitor data without being disrupted, you should use tools that let you spy in an incognito mode “unnoticed.” This requires ecommerce proxies, such as a residential proxy, that allow you to access the internet using real customer IP addresses. This makes you look authentic and local.
A proxy allows your team to circumvent the restrictions and different blocking features on the competitor server’s side that prevent automated data collection, such as on pricing intelligence.
A proxy is essential to get around any blocking features, because it can balance requests’ distribution over different proxy servers. It is an intelligent function that is able to make numerous requests from an original IP that is taken as a human visitor by the target website. Your price crawler will be able to gather and extract the data you need for price intelligence.
Residential proxies perform very well for ecommerce web scraping. They are IP addresses that bypass geo-locations to make you appear to be a real resident of that IP address. Using rotating residential proxies, you can gather a huge amount of competitor data without being noticed. This is because your searches appear like real devices that come from throughout the world. By using reliable proxies, you will be able to do much more in a shorter period of time than using old scraping or mining techniques, like manual web searches.
Benefit #2: Anonymity
In addition to web scraping, the use of proxies by ecommerce platforms also allows them to carry out sensitive tasks without being tracked.
One of the most useful functions of a proxy is making web traffic anonymous. For example, security officers and reporters have used proxies to hide and protect their sources, partners, clients and themselves.
A proxy can also protect company activities, like current research and development tasks. Therefore, if you want to prevent spies from tracking your web traffic monitoring your business activities, you can utilize a proxy to prevent them from tracking what your employees are doing. Proxies are very helpful in allowing you to complete sensitive and important tasks over the internet, without being noticed by competitors.
Benefit #3: Security
Proxies not only allow you to monitor competitor’s activities, but they also secure your enterprise from attacks by hackers.
Proxies help you to prevent cyber criminals from getting into your server and stealing valuable business data. They can also protect your own data from being misused.
Another function of proxies is to deny service attacks and external malware. They also encrypt the data to prevent it from being misappropriated. If you are worried about a breach of your internal network structure, proxies will prevent it from happening. This is because they can also be combined with firewalls and other security measures.
Every company is now concerned about hackers, because they can cause costly damage, such as monetary and reputation loss due to a data breach.
The use of a proxy reduces the risk of a breach, because it adds a security layer between the external traffic and your servers. This acts as a buffer that faces the internet and relays various requests from external network computers.
It will be difficult for hackers to reach the server operating the software, where your company stores data if it is using a proxy. While these hackers can access the proxy, they cannot compromise your data. This is because it adds a layer of protection to your server, which makes you less vulnerable to attacks.
Benefit #4: Performance
There are also caching proxy servers that monitor your organization’s website needs and keep the commonly used website offline. This allows the webpages to be loaded at faster speeds, when it encounters the same request.
It will also reduce hardware cost. This is because it is much less expensive to use a single proxy server, instead of several separate connections. The use of proxies leads to faster webpage loading speeds and lower operational costs.
This is an important disclaimer: not all proxy networks are inherently capable of providing better performance. To achieve this result, you will need to invest your resources to set up a custom proxy solution.
Benefit #5: Internet Use Control
In order to improve and safeguard company security, it is necessary to ensure that your employees do not access inappropriate and unsecured websites. Therefore, you might consider using a local proxy server for your internal networks.
This allows network administrators to monitor and control the devices that can access the network, as well as the websites that they can visit. It allows them to eventually block any unwanted content and websites. Admins/security officers can record the content accessed and the time of access, when needed, to check for and monitor any suspicious or illegal activities that might result in a data breach.
Final Thoughts
Let's summarize everything that we've learned so far:
- Proxies are an essential tool for any ecommerce company that wants to establish a competitive edge.
- Proxies allow for an enhanced competitor research.
- They safeguard the company's privacy and security.
- More advanced proxy setups can even improve network performance and provide internet use control.
From data breaches to intellectual property right theft and DDoS attacks to malware threats, ecommerce businesses can use proxies for a variety of solutions to prevent these threats from happening. It can also be used to reap the rewards of competitor data research and sensitive task execution over the internet. All of these benefits can position your business for success, which is just a button click away.
