The pattern of trade in the digital world is basically the same as what takes place in the physical market. They both need you to have an identity that is trustworthy so that both parties can proceed to complete the transaction without any hesitation.
Imagine a man wearing torn clothes and a bottle of whisky in hand going to an Aston Martin showroom. Without any doubt in mind, you can say he won’t get a test drive. This has nothing to do with his driving skills but it’s because of his identity.
In the digital world, even though such clues aren’t available to help the buyer and seller make up their mind on whether to proceed with the trade, there are other ways to do this. Since every communication between the buyer and the website takes place through the IP, proxies play an important role.
And so in this article, we would explain the **use of proxies for automation and digital economy. **
Post Quick Links
Jump straight to the section of the post you want to read:
Benefits of Proxies for Automation and Digital Economy
How Proxies Can Affect Digital Economy
Since the seller can't access your physical looks when you go online to make a purchase, the website uses other methods to get data on you as you send a request without your knowledge.
Your IP address is the most important data you provide when you send a request. It gives information about your location and other useful data.
An IP is like your home address. It's the source of your sent correspondence and it's also the address to which your mails are sent. Your IP address is the point from where your request is sent and is the destination where the data you requested gets sent to.
With proxies, you can make purchases from any location irrespective of where the seller is. If you were to use your real IP address, some sellers won't agree to sell to you. This would probably because of stereotypes that exist about your location.
You may not even get access to some online retail sites to make purchases if you use your real IP address because of shipping issues. So proxies for the digital economy provide you with a market that exists with little to no barriers.
Your IP address as a seller also provides the buyer with your location information. So a buyer has the choice of making a purchase from your location or not. By changing this address with a proxy, the digital economy is grossly affected.
We encourage the use of proxies for digital economy operations for other reasons too. Proxies allow for data extraction from competitor websites so that informed decisions can be made. This includes pricing intelligence.
Digital marketers also use proxies to help businesses grow by opening multiple accounts and reaching a wider audience.
With proxies, websites can rank bettering search engines. This occurs when keyword research has been done and analyzed to know which ranks better. You can then use the resultant keywords in content creation.
Altering your digital identity isn't only meant for illegal reasons. Some people change their IP addresses to another location so they can access the market for that region and trade. Some do it for access to research material so the possibilities with proxies are endless.
How Proxies Can Affect Automation
Web Scraping
Data extraction has had its fair share of scandal as many people have suffered from data breaches. But when it comes to businesses, private data is not always the priority. With the amount of publicly available data, you can start up a business after analysis when you find that there is a good market there with less competition. Your already existing business can also benefit from the extracted data. This is possible when you make informed choices after intensive data analysis.
You could get this data manually but considering the large volume you may need, it’s a difficult task. You are also more likely to make mistakes when copying and pasting as you click through those pages. Note that clean and accurate data is key to making the best decisions.
So businesses can be more efficient with this speed and accuracy that bots provide. And bots are only efficient when proxies for automation are used.
API
Most internet services have features put in place that allow their customers to have access to specific data efficiently. This feature is known as API (Application Programming Interfaces). By this, you could send a specific request to a platform and get the specific data you need from it. So you can get ticket updates from an airline, or get a tweet with a specific hashtag from Twitter.
API is widely used, and with proxies for automation and digital economy, they are more efficient.
Interesting Read : Building Web Scrapers For eCommerce Data Gathering
Limitation of Automation
The use of automation for data extraction or API calls means a high number of requests would be sent to the target website. Website servers suffer from lags or can even go down when there is a ton of traffic coming in.
What the website administrator does to reduce this is to put up IP blocks and connection limits. These are the strategies that have over the decades saved the internet from complete collapse. Every server has its limit, and if you bypass this limit, the server would crash. So it’s important that the usage limit be less than that.
Over the years, users with malicious intent have sent multiple requests to web servers. This poses a threat to servers and so to protect their investments, website owners have begun using a feature known as Denial of Service (DoS). It prevents any single IP from loading the web server above its capacity by interrupting the user’s connection.
Even though DoS protection creates a problem for the use of automation in data extraction on which businesses thrive, it’s there to save the internet. Without this protection, a lot of web servers would be down, and the internet would be like a ghost town.
Right Ways to Use Proxies for Automation and Digital Economy
Using a single IP isn’t enough especially for automated tasks as it’s the same as using your real IP. When your bot sends multiple requests from a single IP, it's easily detected and your bot would get blocked. But with a pool of IPs, you can change the IP address that sends each request. This way, your bot activity would be as close to that of a human user as possible.
With such an IP pool, the user can send unlimited API calls and collect as much data as is needed. It also allows the user to avoid DDoS attacks. And so proxies for automation and digital economy are useful to both you and the website server.
About the author
Rachael Chapman
A Complete Gamer and a Tech Geek. Brings out all her thoughts and Love in Writing Techie Blogs.
Related Articles
ULTIMATE GUIDE TO DATA CENTER PROXIES
Before we get down to what data center proxies are, we need to first have an understanding of what proxies are. Here is a guide on data center proxies
Facebook Ads in 2018: Updates you should not miss
The year 2018 seems very promising for Facebook advertising especially in the field of AI and ML.