If your business requires you to scrape data from the web, using just your browser to do it will be quite hard due to being blocked or banned from specific websites. Some websites have security measures – others don’t allow access from specific locations.

Whatever the case, you can handle these problems by using proxies. Proxies are the bridge between your IP address and the internet. If a website denies you access by blocking you, proxies help you gain access to that website by masking your IP with theirs. We’re going to delve deeper into the world of proxies, how they work, learn more about rotating IP and sticky IP address, and why you need proxies for your business.

Proxies and their main two types:

There are two main types of proxies: rotating and static.

1) Rotating

Rotating proxies provide the user with an entire pool of different IP addresses, allowing them to rotate IPs accordingly. Each time you need to access a website, you can use a random IP to do it. Businesses use rotating proxies for data scraping for that exact reason, as they help them access target websites without getting detected or being banned.

In the world of e-commerce and online business, organizations need data to drive business decisions. Since the data they need is available online, they need a way to harvest it. The best way to collect data is to use a combination of proxies, other tools, and web scraping bots.

That’s where rotating proxies excel, and they provide businesses with data such as market trends, customer purchase behaviors, competitor pricing, and more. Most reliable proxy service providers (e.g., Oxylabs rotating proxies) will help you find out what kind of proxies your business actually needs.

2) Static

Static proxies allow the user to use a unique, single IP to access the internet. Statics act like datacenter IPs that the user can assign to themselves and use them as long as they need to. Static IP is also known as a sticky IP address, and it provides reliable bandwidth and high speeds while maintaining high levels of privacy and anonymity online.

Both static and rotating proxies are excellent data scraping choices, but there are certain cases where statics are better than rotating proxies. Since they aren’t based on a virtual machine, static proxies can ideally hide their IP address and render any scraping activity as not suspicious.

In other words, statics allows any business to scrape the web for data without any risks or disturbances, significantly reducing any chances of being detected or flagged as bot users.

Why Do Businesses Use Them?

The e-commerce industry and data scraping are closely connected and tied together. E-commerce, rotating and static proxies, and data scraping are all connected in the business game of getting ahead of the competition curve. Businesses in the e-commerce industry rely on the internet to go about their daily business.

They need data to beat their competitors, stay on top of the trends, and keep their customers happy. Since all the data they need is available on the internet, businesses use proxies to get their hands on that valuable information to help them achieve their business goals.

In the online business landscape, competition is becoming fiercer, and markets are saturated while consumers demand customer-centric service 24/7/365. They want the best prices and use Google and other search engines to find the products they need.

Proxies allow businesses to cope with all these things and still manage to run their operations with success. Companies need data scraping to go about their daily business goals, as it helps streamline competition research and provide the most accurate information on what competitors have been up to.

That aside, proxies also help businesses in many different ways. Proxies allow businesses to improve institutional and corporate security, anonymously handle sensitive data and tasks, improve uptimes and balance traffic, protect servers from crashing, control data and internet usage, etc.

Web Scraping and Rotating Proxies

Web scraping benefits businesses in many different ways. It helps with lead generation, price comparison, understanding the consumers, monitoring competition, keyword research, and more. However, major target websites use measures, features, and systems to detect and block all those who try to scrape their data.

That’s where rotating proxies come into play. They help businesses bypass those systems and scrape data undetected and without risk of being blocked. Nowadays, companies are required to establish a strong presence on social media platforms.

To do that, they need multiple accounts to keep an eye on competitors, boost sales, and grow their operations. However, using multiple accounts exposes your business to a risk of getting banned, as using multiple accounts is against the rules. Rotating proxies help bypass these restrictions by automatically changing IPs when necessary.

Conclusion

Both static and rotating proxies are great solutions for web scraping and getting ahead of the competition curve. Both proxy types have their ups and downs, and both can help get your business on the worldwide map, attract more customers, and grow your business.

If it comes to scraping the web for data on an individual level, we recommend using a static proxy with a sticky IP address. However, if you need to launch a project on a larger scale that includes scraping multiple websites, rotating proxies are the best solution for getting the data you need without being blocked or detected.