Managing Web Scraping Proxies Can Be Difficult For E-Commerce Retailers

If you’re reading this article, you already know that your business needs to implement web scraping for market research, competitor monitoring, and more. However, web scraping comes with a set of difficult challenges. This is especially true if you are trying to do everything yourself rather than hiring a web scraping service. The three biggest challenges that companies face when implementing web scraping include dealing with massive numbers of requests, creating effective proxy management logic, and reliably getting high-quality data. Read on to learn more about the challenges that companies face when implementing web scraping.

Dealing With The Vast Numbers Of Requests

One of the first problems that companies run into when initially implementing their web scraping practices is simply getting enough IPs to deal with the vast numbers of requests. Many companies need enough IPs to complete 20 million successful requests every day. This would require thousands upon thousands of IPs. To make things even trickier, you’re going to need a good mix of location and residential/datacenter IPs.

Creating Effective Proxy Management Logic

If you’ve ever tried to take on a web scraping project with a very simple proxy management program, you’ve probably noticed that a relatively high percentage of your requests are unsuccessful. This often happens due to captchas. Captchas are the bane of many web scraping projects. More sophisticated proxy management programs do have solutions for such problems, however. Also, some websites will ban IPs that they suspect are being used for web scraping. Again, simple proxy management software will probably be flummoxed. However, more complex proxy management software can get around these problems.

Getting High-Quality Data Reliably

Bugs and glitches occur in all kinds of software, but bugs and glitches in web scraping software can end up costing companies time and money. If your web scraping software is down for even a few hours, you may miss crucial data. Also, you need to be able to sift through the huge amounts of data that your web scraping is going to pull in. You also need to keep in mind that some sites, especially e-commerce sites, may intentionally put out misleading data to web scraping IPs. Of course, good web scraping software can do most of this sifting for you. As a general rule, the more analyzing you have to do manually, the more money you are wasting with your web scraping project.

The Two Possible Solutions For These Challenges

There are two possible solutions to these web scraping challenges. The first option is to build a reliable and comprehensive web scraping infrastructure yourself. This grants you a greater degree of control, but it also takes huge investments of time and money. The second (and more popular) option is to find a reliable proxy rotation service that will provide the proxy infrastructure you need. Generally, only large corporations with huge budgets and lots of manpower create the web scraping infrastructure they need in-house.

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by James Woods via The Merkle Hash