Taobao is a Chinese e-commerce platform owned by Alibaba and based in Hangzhou, China. According to Alexa, it was the ninth most visited website in the world in 2021. It was registered by Alibaba Cloud Computing (Beijing) Co., Ltd on April 21, 2003. Taobao Marketplace allows small businesses and individual entrepreneurs to open online stores, providing a platform for consumer-to-consumer (C2C) retail. Its stores offer express delivery and the majority of products are new items sold at fixed prices. Auctions make up a smaller part of Taobao’s transactions. Buyers can use ratings, comments, and complaints to evaluate sellers.
Why Do You Need a Proxy for Taobao?
Proxies for Taobao are essential to efficiently extract data and to avoid geo-restrictions. Web scraping of Taobao can yield useful information regarding items, supplies, trends, and customer feedback on a large scale. However, without proxies, sending too many requests from the same IP address will be noticed and can block access to the platform. By utilizing a reliable proxy server, every request can be made with a different IP address, making the data gathering operation undetectable.
Furthermore, proxy servers can be used to mask an IP address and access Taobao from a region where it is available despite geo-restrictions. Additionally, proxies can help avoid dynamic pricing, where retailers charge more based on personal information gathered from user activity. By changing the location and other details with a proxy server, you can buy products at the original price. You can also try different proxies in different locations to find the best price.
Now that you understand the importance of proxies for Taobao, you might be wondering what the best ones are.
What Are the Best Proxies for Taobao?
If you’re looking to scrape a website for data, rotating proxies are the best choice. With this method, you can use an alternate IP address for each request you send to Taobao, and you can get a new IP address after a certain period of time (ranging from 30 seconds to 24 hours). To achieve this, you can choose either a rotating residential or datacenter proxy. Residential proxies are actual devices (desktop or mobile) that connect to the internet through an ISP, making them indistinguishable from genuine visitors, and giving you the advantage of choosing the location of your proxies. However, they are usually more expensive compared to datacenter proxies. Datacenter proxies, on the other hand, have IP addresses that come from the cloud. They are faster and more affordable, making them ideal if you only need an IP address from a different location.