Taobao is a Chinese e-commerce platform owned by Alibaba, based in Hangzhou, China. According to Alexa, it was the ninth most visited website in 2021. It was initially registered on April 21, 2003 by Alibaba Cloud Computing (Beijing) Co., Ltd. Taobao Marketplace provides a platform for small businesses and independent entrepreneurs to operate online stores and offer express delivery services. Sellers can list their items for sale at a fixed price or through the auction option. Most products are new items sold at fixed prices, with auctions making up a small portion of the total transactions. Buyers can use the website’s ratings, comments, and complaints to evaluate sellers.
Why Do You Need a Proxy for Taobao?
You’d be surprised to know how much online content stays behind some type of IP-based block or prevention measure today. Proxies for Taobao are essential for two reasons: efficient web scraping and avoiding geo-restrictions.
Scraping an e-commerce giant like Taobao provides useful information concerning items, supplies, trends, and customer feedback, on a massive scale. Taobao contains tremendous amounts of information sellers can use to examine pricing patterns and other trends to help them adjust their business strategy on the platform.
A web scraping tool will get the job done, but if you use it without proxies, you’ll quickly lose access to the platform. Sending too many requests from the same IP address will get unwanted attention. By employing a reliable proxy server, you can use a different IP address in a different location for every request, making your data gathering operation completely undetectable.
Secondly, there are several areas in the world from which you cannot access Taobao due to geo-restrictions. By employing proxy servers, you can mask your IP address and replace it with one located in a region where Taobao’s website is available without issues.
Finally, proxies help you avoid dynamic pricing. Although the internet provides access to many products and services, your location and other personal information might work against you. Based on what they know about you, online retailers can modify their pricing dynamically. What’s the last thing you looked at on the internet? What are your current whereabouts? Have you visited their website before, and if so, what did you find most interesting? This data could be used to raise prices just for you.
If you employ proxies when shopping on Taobao, you can easily avoid dynamic pricing because the retailers will not have any real information about you or your location. You can use the proxy servers to change your location and other details so that you buy your products at the original price. Even better, you can try a few proxies in different locations and save significant amounts of money by looking for the best price.
Now that you understand why you need proxies for Taobao, you are probably wondering what the best proxies are. Read on!
What Are the Best Proxies for Taobao?
If you’re looking to scrape a website for data, rotating proxies are the smartest choice. With a rotating proxy, you can choose to use a new IP address for each request you send to the website, with the option of a new IP address every 30 seconds to 24 hours. You can choose either a rotating residential proxy or a datacenter proxy. Residential proxies are real devices that connect to the internet through an ISP, making them difficult to distinguish from genuine visitors and the best choice for smooth web scraping. They are usually more expensive than datacenter proxies. Datacenter proxies are not associated with any ISPs and are usually faster and more affordable than residential proxies, making them a great choice if you just need an IP address in a different location.
