E-commerce price monitoring: Lowe's real-time tracking system building

Real life example: why did they get their IP blocked by Lowe's?

Last year, a wholesale sanitary ware customer complained to me, using their own office network to catch Lowe's price data, the third day was blocked IP. worse is that they use the cloud server to hang scripts, the result is that the whole machine IP is blacked out. This is not unusual, now the anti-climbing mechanism of the e-commerce platform is more strict than the security check.

Three major pitfalls of traditional surveillance solutions

Many teams have tried these methods at first:

Especially if you do cross-border price comparison, the time difference problem is more headache. Los Angeles price adjustment at 3:00 p.m., your side of the script hangs at 3:00 a.m., the next morning only to find that the data disconnect.

Our trick: Distributed IP Pooling

Here's a hands-on experience: using ipipgo'sDynamic Residential AgentsThe system was tested last week when I was helping a client build a system, and the same product page was polled by 50 different IPs, with 20 requests per hour, and it ran for 72 hours without triggering any alerts.

The key configuration parameters are set this way:

- Request interval:Random 8-15 seconds
- IP Switching:IP change every 5 requests
- Timeout setting:Don't take more than 20 seconds.

Be careful to disguise the User-Agent as a normal browser, don't use Python's default request header, I've seen this pitfall at least a dozen times.

Hands on monitoring system

1. Open a backend in ipipgo.Residential Agent PackageSelect "Auto Rotation" mode.
2. Write a scheduler in Python (don't use Scrapy, it's too heavy)
3. Here's the kicker: when parsing the page add aPrice fluctuation detectionWhen a price change of more than 5% is detected, a secondary agent pool review is immediately initiated
4. Do not only use MySQL to store data, price snapshots with MongoDB to store more flexible

There's a point that's easy to overlook: the settingsException Status Code Fusing Mechanism. For example, 3 consecutive IP returns 403 error, pause for 10 minutes and try again, this can effectively avoid account blocking.

Something you might have trouble with.

Scene 1:Page rewrite causes selectors to fail
Solution:Open in the ipipgo consolePage Renderingfunction that directly takes the rendered DOM tree

Scene 2:Encountering CAPTCHA
Solution:Don't be a hard-ass. Just redirect these requests to ipipgo's.High Survival IP PoolIn conjunction with man-machine verification services

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Do I have to use a paid proxy? Not the free ones?
A: Let's put it this way, last year's double eleven our test group with free proxy, the success rate is only 7%. ipipgo's commercial proxy on the day of the success rate remained in the 91% or more, the money can not be saved.

Q: How many IPs should I prepare to be enough?
A: According to this formula: monitoring the number of goods × daily crawl ÷ 1500. such as staring at 500 goods, crawl 1 time per hour, almost need 20 dynamic IP. but it is recommended to leave 30% margin.

Q: What should I do if I encounter a particularly stubborn anti-climb?
A: Turn it on in the ipipgo backendProtocol artifactspattern to disguise the traffic as normal app requests. This was just used last week to take care of a certain difficult furniture category backcrawl.

Tell the truth.

What's the biggest fear of doing price monitoring? It's not the technical difficulties, it'smotion distortion. I've seen too many people spend their energy on cracking CAPTCHA, but ignore the quality of proxy IPs. With ipipgo's intelligent routing function, you can automatically avoid high-risk IP segments, this month we have a customer with this function, the rate of blocked IP directly down 80%.

One last reminder: never write dead IP addresses in your code! The most outrageous case I've seen was when someone stored a proxy IP in plaintext in a public GitHub repository, only to have the entire IP segment blacked out by the platform. Use ipipgo's API to get the IP dynamically, which is both secure and easy to update.