Shopee Platform Crawl: Southeast Asia E-Commerce Data Crawler

Why are you always treated like a robot when you're skimming data at Shopee?

Recently, a number of brothers doing Southeast Asian markets complained to me that when using a crawler to grab Shopee product information, the movement of theCAPTCHA pop-upOr directly blocked IP. there is an old iron worse, just run two days of scripts suddenly shut down, check the logs found that the success rate of the request fell to 30% less than. This is in fact with you in the night market stalls always be the city manager stared at a reason - the platform anti-climbing mechanism feel that your operation is too regular.

Take a real case: a Shenzhen-based cross-border e-commerce company wants to monitor the price of cell phone accessories in Indonesia site. They use their own office network to capture 5,000 commodity pages every day at regular intervals. As a result, the third day, not only did not catch the data, even normal access to the store background are affected. This is a typicalIP address exposure characteristics, the platform blacked out the entire IP segment.

How did proxy IPs become a lifesaver?

This is the time to offer up the godsend that is the proxy IP. It's simply a way to give your crawler programConstantly changing vests.The platform will think that each request is operated by a different user. However, there are a variety of proxy services on the market, and choosing the wrong type is still a turnaround.

Like ipipgo home Southeast Asia residential IP pool, measured in the catch Shopee Malaysia site, 7 consecutive days request success rate can be maintained at more than 92%. They have aIP warm-up mechanismQuite interesting, the new IP will first simulate normal user browsing behavior, and then start crawling after half an hour, this trick can really fool a lot of anti-climbing system.

Teach you to match the proxy crawler by hand

Here's a chestnut with Python's requests library (be careful to turn up the timeout setting, the Southeast Asian network is sometimes jerky):

import requests
from itertools import cycle

proxy_pool = cycle([
    'http://user:pass@gateway.ipipgo.com:8000',
    'http://user:pass@gateway.ipipgo.com:8001'.
     It is recommended to have more than 10 entries
])

url = 'https://shopee.co.id/api/v4/item/get'
headers = {'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Android 10; Mobile)'}

for _ in range(100): proxy = next(proxy_pool)
    proxy = next(proxy_pool)
    try: resp = requests.get(url)
        resp = requests.get(url, proxies={"http": proxy}, headers=headers, timeout=15)
         Remember to add a random sleep, 0.5-3 seconds is safe.
    except.
         Automatically throw failed proxies into the cooling pool
        ipipgo.report_failure(proxy) 

Focus on three easy places to fall head over heels:

1. Device fingerprint in the request headerDon't use the default Python UA, go grab a real cell phone model and fill it in
2. Don't be too diligent in switching IPs, at least 5-10 requests for one IP.
3. Don't fight the CAPTCHA, retry with a different state IP (e.g. cut from Jakarta to Surabaya)

Why do older drivers recommend ipipgo?

At first our team tested 7 proxy service providers and finally locked ipipgo mainly because of these three reasons:

• Their family has their own server room in the Philippines.Southeast Asian latency can be squeezed to within 150ms
• Supports customization of IP segments by ASN number, which is useful when you need to catch data from specific sellers.
• I was surprised to get a second response from customer service at 3am, tech support is really on point!

Especially when doing the Thai market, it was found that ipipgo's Bangkok node was able to bypass Shopee'sarea-based traffic control strategyThe first time I saw this, I was able to get the data for the mother and baby category. There was a time to grab the data of mother and baby category, with ordinary agents can only get the basic information, after cutting to their golden IP pool, even the hidden promotional inventory are raked out.

QA time: the pitfalls you may have encountered

Q: Do I still have to do rate limiting with a proxy IP?
A: It must be done! Even if the IP is more, the request frequency is too high as usual to trigger the wind control. It is recommended to refer to this formula:Concurrency = total number of IPs ÷ 2

Q: Is it worth it for residential IP to be three times more expensive than data center IP?
A: It depends on the business scenario. If it is grabbing monitoring or price tracking, it is recommended to mix them. For ordinary commodity information grabbing, using data center IP with a good rotation strategy is fine.

Q: What should I do if I encounter Cloudflare protection?
A: This is the time to get on ipipgo'sReal Life Certified IP, their solution would go through the human verification first, then keep the session state for continuous crawling.

Lastly, a reminder to all the brothers that data capture should be a good ideaSustainable developmentDon't crash their servers just to be fast. Don't crash people's servers for the sake of trying to be fast, and then no one will be able to play. Reasonable use of proxy IP, good request interval control, in order to get the gold mine of data in the long run.