Newegg Price Tracking Robot Development Guide

What's the point of tracking robots at this price?

Recently, a lot of friends have asked me, squatting on Newegg's specials is like speculating in the stock market, the price changes in a blink of an eye. Last month, I saw a video card with a price tag of 399 knives, but when I went to make a cup of coffee, the price went up to 450 knives.Robots that keep an eye on price changes 24 hours a day, definitely saves a lot of wasted money.

We all know that regular crawlers are prone to getting their IPs blocked by Newegg, right? Last year I wrote a script for someone, at first I had no problem checking 3 times per hour, but on the third day I got a 403 error. Then I switched toDynamic Residential Proxy for ipipgo, using their rotating IP feature, this problem is solved.

Choosing a proxy IP is like buying vegetables. You have to pick the fresh ones.

There are a plethora of agency service providers on the market, but the ones that are suitable for price tracking must fulfill three conditions:① IP survival time is controllable ② Geographic location is accurate ③ Request success rate is high enoughThe first thing you need to do is to get the best possible IP pools for your business. Here must be amenable to ipipgo's intelligent scheduling system, their IP pool will automatically match the optimal node based on usage.

Hands on monitoring system

Let's start with the core logic:Simulate real human browsing behavior + dynamic IP camouflage. Here's a tip, don't use the product page link directly, but go through the search page layer by layer. For example, if you want to monitor "RTX 4090″, you should first visit the path electronics→graphic-cards→NVIDIA.

The most critical part of the code section is the request header settings, remember to add the Accept-Language and Referer parameters. When using ipipgo's API to get a proxy, it is recommended to set thesession_sticky=30parameter so that the same session can keep the same IP for 30 seconds to avoid being recognized as a bot.

I've stepped in these potholes for you.

① Don't stare at the single product page and swipe, Newegg's anti-crawl mechanism will record the page dwell time. It is recommended to check the price every 5 minutes, while random intervals of 3-8 seconds before launching the request.

② Don't panic when you come across a captcha, ipipgo'sHigh Stash AgentsCombined with browser fingerprinting camouflage, it can reduce the CAPTCHA trigger rate by more than 70%. If you really can't get around it, set auto pause for 1 hour before continuing.

③ Don't use MySQL for data storage, but recommend InfluxDB, a time-series database, to display price fluctuation data in a line graph, and to setMoving Average Alert, which is more reliable than just threshold alerts.

QA time: what you might want to ask

Q: How often are IPs blocked?
A: the actual test with ordinary proxy every hour seal 3-5 times, change ip ipgo after the maximum daily trigger 1 time verification code

Q: How many proxy IPs are needed to be enough?
A: 20 dynamic IPs are enough to cover the whole day monitoring, and ipipgo's package is enough to choose the basic version.

Q: How long is the price fluctuation alert delayed?
A: Reasonable settings can be done within 3 minutes notification, the key to open ipipgo backup channel function

One last rant, don't toss your own proxy server. I rented an EC2 server from AWS to save money on proxies, but Newegg blocked my entire IP segment. Directly on the ipipgo business program, save time can grab several waves of discounted goods. There are any specific questions welcome to our official website to find technical customer service nagging, they are 24 hours online to answer.