Tag Archive for: proxy providers

When your business relies on e-commerce for its sales strategy, having current prices of your competitors’ products is essential knowledge. However, businesses relying on digital sales can often run into issues when trying to assess the market. It does not take too much effort for a competitor to blacklist an IP address or provide incorrect data based on specific search terms if they are onto you. 

The best solution for this is to use proxies to give you anonymity in your competitor research and make sure that you are always able to be on top of any price changes and react accordingly. Using a proxy server also allows you to get around geo-blocking restrictions when assessing the global market and ensures that, with access to real-time pricing, you can run strategic promotions, putting your product on the front foot. We’ll explain in more detail here to give you everything you need to know about using proxies for price monitoring. 

Always Access Your Competitors’ Platforms Anonymously

A common tactic employed by e-commerce businesses is to confuse their competitors by either displaying incorrect information or by blacklisting them entirely from accessing their platform. This is because digital marketing teams can build up a clear picture of their warm leads through search terms and IP addresses that can lead to them working out that the profile they’re looking at is one of their competitors. At this stage, they will do anything they can to shake you off their tail.

When a competitor thinks it has you in its sights, it can actually start to deliver targeted information to you that is entirely incorrect, leading you to make poor business decisions based on false pricing. The last thing you want to be doing is running a pricing campaign to undercut your competitor, and it not be relevant or accurate to their actual prices. 

One way to fix this and to guarantee that you are accessing accurate and current information is to use the best proxy service and select a relevant city server from which to visit your competitor’s website. Using a proxy server anonymises your presence and guarantees you aren’t being misled when trying to keep tabs on product prices.

As you can select a specific server, based on your choice of city, using several proxies also allows you to see how your competitors offer different prices in different territories, but more on that in a moment.

Avoid Geo-blocking Issues by Using the Best Proxy Providers

Another tactic employed by e-commerce businesses is probably one you use yourself, too. Offering different prices in different territories means that you can tailor your product and marketing strategy to meet the audience wherever it is located. However, you’re sometimes actually unable to access the market abroad because you are faced with geo-restrictions and being locked out of seeing how your competitor prices its product overseas.

Geo-blocking is such a common obstacle these days that most good digital marketing teams are employing the use of the best proxy server they can find, giving them a fast connection from any number of global cities to keep real-time tabs on the prices of their competitors’ products around the world. Ultimately, it is well worth keeping in mind that your competitors are most likely doing the same with your products, making this a worthwhile investment for your digital marketing team.

One common example of running into geo-blocking when running an e-commerce business is by trying to access the EU market from the USA, and vice versa. This is because there are different business and product laws in the two markets, so it can be much simpler for a business to lock one territory out of accessing its web platform entirely and redirect them to the products available in the user’s target market. This is why using a proxy is crucial in ensuring you have the most up-to-date information on what your competitor does abroad, no matter where you are based.

Check Prices in Real-time to Run Strategic Promotions

There is only one way for a business to be able to scrape accurate real-time pricing, and that is by using a proxy server. Your digital marketing team will also thank you for the fact that proxy servers allow them to assess your competitor’s marketing strategy in each specific market as well. When you’re safe in the knowledge of understanding how your competitors are currently pricing their products, you can then create strategic promotions to put your own product at the top of the market.

We discussed earlier that your competitors can deliberately show you false information if they have an idea as to who you are through your IP address and search terms; the opposite is therefore also true, your competitors will be using the same method to access your current prices via a proxy. By having your own spreadsheet updated with the most relevant pricing, you can create not only the best seasonal pricing campaigns, but also ones that allow you to take advantage of when your competitors put their prices up, or alter their own product strategy, by offering them warm leads directly.

One such example is that you could run a retargeting campaign the day that your competitor stops running promotional pricing and redirect those warm leads back to your product with a price to undercut the market. The only way you can guarantee that you offer the best possible discount is to have checked your competitors’ prices that morning via a proxy server. 

There Are No Downsides to Using Proxy Servers in E-commerce

The opportunities are bountiful when using a proxy server to help run an e-commerce business. For relatively low cost, you can give your digital marketing team the best possible chance for success and all the tools with which to run the most effective marketing campaigns. You should invest in acquiring as many proxies as markets that you operate your e-commerce business in, as this way you guarantee that you can keep tabs on each of your competitors anonymously, as well as being able to scrape current live pricing data on their products.

With this information at your fingertips, your marketing and sales teams will be able to offer the best price to the right people at all times in your sales funnel.