Proxies for e-commerce price monitoring

What can you monitor?Copy Anchor Link

Which proxy type should you use?Copy Anchor Link

Residential proxies start at $2.42 per GB.

Why location mattersCopy Anchor Link

Retailers localise more than the currency. Tax display, shipping, stock and even the base price can depend on where a visitor appears to be. Add country targeting to the proxy username to see each market, for example __cr.us for the United States or __cr.de for Germany.

Some prices change within a country, such as grocery delivery by ZIP code. City and ZIP targeting cover those cases: City, state, ZIP and ASN targeting on per-GB pools uses traffic at 2x the standard rate. Location targeting lists every parameter.

How to build a reliable price monitorCopy Anchor Link

1. List the product pages

   Start from the products you sell or compete with, and keep a list of their URLs. Do not try to crawl a whole store when you only need a few hundred products.

2. Read structured data first

   Most product pages include schema.org Product data with the price, currency and availability. It changes less often than the page layout, so your parser breaks less.

3. Schedule by how fast prices move

   Daily is enough for most catalogs. Spread requests across the day instead of sending them in one burst.

4. Use a clean session per check

   Send each check from the target country with no cookies from earlier visits, so the result is the price a new local shopper sees.

5. Store history and alert on change

   Keep every observation with its time and country, and alert only when a price or stock status actually changes.

6. Back off on errors

   Treat 429 and 5xx responses as a signal to slow down, retry later with exponential backoff, and stop if a site asks you to.

Python example: read a price from product structured dataCopy Anchor Link

import json
import re

import requests

# Country targeting goes after the username: __cr.us = United States
PROXY = "http://USERNAME__cr.us:PASSWORD@HOST:PORT"
proxies = {"http": PROXY, "https": PROXY}
JSON_LD = re.compile(r"<script[^>]*application/ld\+json[^>]*>(.*?)</script>", re.S | re.I)


def products(node):
    """Yield every schema.org Product in a JSON-LD document."""
    if isinstance(node, list):
        for item in node:
            yield from products(item)
    elif isinstance(node, dict):
        kind = node.get("@type")
        if kind == "Product" or (isinstance(kind, list) and "Product" in kind):
            yield node
        yield from products(node.get("@graph", []))


def offer(url: str) -> dict | None:
    html = requests.get(url, proxies=proxies, timeout=30).text
    for block in JSON_LD.findall(html):
        try:
            data = json.loads(block)
        except json.JSONDecodeError:
            continue
        for product in products(data):
            offers = product.get("offers") or {}
            first = offers[0] if isinstance(offers, list) else offers
            return {
                "price": first.get("price"),
                "currency": first.get("priceCurrency"),
                "availability": first.get("availability"),
            }
    return None


print(offer("https://shop.example.com/product/123"))

Stay within the law and each site's rulesCopy Anchor Link

• Public pages only. Do not log in, use member-only prices you are not entitled to, or get around paywalls or other access controls.
• Follow the site's rules. Respect robots.txt and the site's terms, keep request rates modest, and stop if the site asks you to.
• Leave out personal data. Prices and stock are enough. Do not collect reviewer names, profiles or other personal data without a lawful basis.
• Price independently. Use what you collect to set your own prices. Sharing pricing data with competitors to align prices can break competition law.
• Prefer official feeds. Where a retailer or marketplace offers a product feed, affiliate feed or seller API, use it.

The FuseProxy acceptable use policy lists what is not allowed on the network.