Proxies exist for a variety of reasons, ranging from the innocent to the malicious. Most individuals using proxies today simply want anonymity in a world where our personal information is increasingly visible to those who know where to look. Whether it’s browsing habits or consumer data, there are many entities out there who’d love to know everything about your browsing history.
For some, however, proxies provide many other advantages. For those who interact with other businesses, residential proxies provide a level of security and reliability that other proxies cannot match. While individuals may sometimes use these proxies to circumvent limits on ticket purchases or limited edition items, businesses have many other uses for them.
Let’s look at how companies take advantage of residential proxies to monitor prices among their competitors.
How Residential Proxies Work
Many data center proxy services provide valuable benefits to consumers, and for a lot of people, they are enough. However, residential proxies up the game. Simply put, many websites can easily identify this type of proxies, making it quick and easy for websites to block these visitors from engaging with their services.
Residential proxies differ from those originating from data centres in that they mimic traditional internet users, appearing no different than a random individual browsing the internet. Combined with the flexibility to switch between various IP addresses, residential proxies are undoubtedly a great solution for anonymity and guaranteed access to websites.
Why Businesses Use Residential Proxies
Residential proxies have a huge selling point for entities who don’t want to be identified: they mimic traditional ISP users. While many other proxies use IP clusters that have long since been identified, residential proxies avoid this and are generally indistinguishable from any other internet user.
This provides inherent value to businesses that want to keep an eye on their competitors. In many cases, competitors will identify browsing habits and traffic of other businesses and summarily ban them from interacting with their products and pages. Likewise, most of data center proxies can also be identified, leading to the same fate.
Monitoring Prices Just Became Easier
Residential proxies blend in with existing web traffic on a website, making it difficult to detect. In the event you are detected, switching to a new IP is usually very simple. Many businesses have restrictions in place that limit user activity, making it difficult to examine a competitor’s website and collect information about its prices and product selections.
Whether a business is scraping data and information from another website or merely doing the occasional price check, residential proxies ensure that access to any website is always available. Businesses that are utilising scripts to collect information and pricing from various websites will enjoy a higher likelihood of continued success, which cannot be guaranteed with other types of proxies.
In short, residential proxies allow businesses greater access to data and price scraping techniques, which can be used to more accurately track a competition’s plans and activities. Residential proxies are one example of high-tech solutions repurposing age-old business tactics. In an age where competition is more cut-throat than ever, every business must use the very best solutions when keeping an eye on their respective industries.
