In the ever-evolving world of e-commerce, beating your competition is crucial. Therefore, businesses are always on the lookout for every possible advantage. Companies increasingly use anonymity tools, like ISP proxies, to facilitate web scraping, gaining access to geo-restricted content and other benefits. These proxies, while often perceived as technical jargon, offer straightforward applications that yield significant benefits for online businesses. This article aims to dive into various ways ISP proxies enhance e-commerce operations.
Before we dive into use cases for proxies, let’s look at some relevant E-commerce statistics that highlight how important investing in improving your online business is.
E-commerce sales globally have been rising steadily over the years:
- 2021: $4.98 trillion,
- 2022: increased by 6.22% to $5.29 trillion,
- 2023: increased by 10.2% to $5.82 trillion,
- 2024: projected to increase by 8.75% to $6.33 trillion,
- 2027: projected to increase by 25.78% to $7.96 trillion.
It’s typical for customers to use both online and physical stores at the same time when making a purchase:
- In 2023, 83% of shoppers who go to a physical store have done at least some research online.
- In 2023 44% of customer journeys start via search engines.
- In 2023 41% of customer journeys begin in online stores.
Web Scraping For Competitive Analysis
Competitive analysis (CI) refers to collecting and analyzing data about one’s competitors. One of the primary uses of proxies in e-commerce is to facilitate CI through web scraping. This involves collecting data from competitor websites to analyze their pricing, product offerings, and customer feedbacks. The vast data collected is then used for automatic price updating and propping up inventory holes. Customer feedbacks can be analyzed with various AI-powered tools that detect customer sentiment – which can then be used to improve or create new products and improve customer experience in other ways. How do proxies come into play? Websites receive a lot of traffic during web scraping. Websites are equipped with tools that detect IP addresses, where constant requests are coming from, and then ban or give them CPATCHAs to complete. This is a hindrance to scraping. ISP proxies bypass this issue by rotating IP addresses, making the traffic appear like coming from multiple legitimate users, thus avoiding detection and blocking.
Unlocking Geo-Restricted Content
Geo-restriction is a term used to describe the type of content only accessible to users from specific geographical regions. This is achieved by implementing strict region-blocking, where content is locked manually or deliberately, and by algorithms that determine which content the user will see. Regardless of how region-restricting happens, e-commerce stores can benefit substantially by accessing geo-restricted content. For instance, a company in the US might want to know how a competitor’s website appears to users in Europe or Asia. A business looking to expand globally has to gather information about local customs and customer preferences and observe local trends in social media. ISP proxies allow the user to appear as if browsing from anywhere in the world, thus bypassing regional content restrictions.
Improved Security and Anonymity
While a minor point in this article, it’s still worth noting. Proxies add an extra layer of security for their customers by masking the IP addresses of e-commerce businesses.
This can protect sensitive data and transactions from cyber-security attacks by anonymizing web traffic. This security measure helps maintain customer trust and ensures safer online transactions.
Multi-Accounting
Multi-accounting refers to one user having multiple accounts on the same platform. Many popular social media and e-commerce platforms restrict the number of accounts created from a single IP address. Why is this detrimental? Well, a lot of the marketing nowadays is done through social media. Companies and influencers, especially those promoting multiple products, might want to distinguish between product lines or foster a wider online following. For example, an audio technology producer might be selling microphones and headphones. However, while analyzing their social media metrics, they realized only a portion of their audience pays attention to both lines of products. To drive user engagement, this company can start managing multiple social media accounts: one for microphones and another for headphones, thus boosting user engagement for both product lines. ISP proxies are essential for multi-accounting for their ability to provide an authentic IP address, one that’s coming from an internet service provider. By employing these services, a single user can have multiple social media accounts that all appear like unique users.
Enhancing Website Performance
When competition is fierce, any advantage you can turn the tide. Customers aren’t only interested in product offerings and prices-they also want quality and an enjoyable user experience. That’s why website performance is paramount. A faster, more responsive website leads to more customer conversion. Proxies can significantly improve website performance by caching frequently accessed data. It sounds a bit technical, but the simple explanation is that proxies store a copy of a web page and resources locally. This allows them to deliver content more quickly when users request the same information again, reducing the need to fetch it from the original server.
There are other ways in which proxies facilitate website improvement. These services can simulate various scenarios, such as accessing the site from different geographical locations or testing the site’s performance under high-traffic conditions. Developers use this to identify and fix any issues before they can affect real users. Additionally, they are used to test localization efforts, ensuring that the website provides a seamless experience to users across the globe.
Conclusion
ISP proxies serve as invaluable tools in the arsenal of e-commerce businesses. They facilitate competitive analysis by gathering data from competitor websites without disruption or recognition. They enable companies to conduct comprehensive market research by accessing geo-restricted content and monitoring global trends. Additionally, proxies enable website testing under various simulated conditions, preventing users from having to experience bad website performance. Furthermore, website speed is increased by the caching of frequently accessed data.
Overall, proxies bolster customer satisfaction and improve sales to an e-commerce business of any size.