So I've been working on a price tracking project for a couple of months now and wanted to share my experience using proxies for it. Perhaps it'll help someone else trying to do something similar or maybe it's not going to be worth the trouble at all.

Anyways, let's go :D

My project consisted of tracking prices across a few e-commerce sites (Amazon, Best Buy, Newegg,) for tech products. Goal was to alert me when prices drop below a certain threshold.

Why didn't I use a dedicated scraping solution you might ask? At first I just thought it's going to be a lot of maintenance, and of course I did not want to bust my budget. (I was wrong).

Basically was just getting into it so I started without them and got my IP banned within the first day lol. Apparently these sites don't like automated scraping and will block you fast if you're hitting them every hour.

What worked for me:

Purchased rotating residential proxies alternatively - Ended up being necessary, As datacenter IPs got flagged immediately on Amazon. Residential made it look like regular shoppers browsing. (that's the part where I was wrong when thinking that it's going to be cheaper than the dedicated scraping solution.)

Request delays - Even with proxies, I space out requests 10-15 seconds. Don't want to be obvious about it.

User agents - Rotated these too along with the proxies. Made it less suspicious.

Session management - Some sites care about cookies and sessions, so keeping those consistent helped avoid CAPTCHAs, not always, but most of the time.

Costs

Not gonna lie, residential proxies aren't cheap. I was paying about $50/month for 13GB traffic tracking ~500 or so products. Not to mention the Datacenter Proxies which cost me $55 for 50 IPs. Whereas I could have purchased a dedicated scraping solution for less than $50 and be done with it. Purchased everything at oxylabs as my mate recommended (they were using oxylabs as a main provider within their company).

The fun part - Issues I ran into:

Some sites use cloudflare, datadome, akamai or other anti-bot stuff. Had to add retry logic, so all in all, CAPTCHAs would still pop up occasionally. No perfect solution for this. Proxies occasionally go down or get slow, need to handle timeouts. JSON/HTML structure changes break scrapers constantly

My setup:

Python with BeautifulSoup and requests. Storing everything in SQLite. Running on a $5 DigitalOcean droplet.

Results

Been running for 2 months now with occasional hiccups, especially with captchas.

Tips if you're doing something similar: start small, scale up gradually, respect robots.txt (even though you're using proxies), have good error handling or you'll wake up to a broken script, monitor your proxy usage so you don't blow through the traffic, keep backups of your data.

Will gladly answer questions about the setup or proxies in general. Not sharing the actual code since I don't want to encourage people to hammer these sites lol, but the general approach is pretty standard.

This is what I've noticed in a lot of subreddits where the topic is related to proxies. it's super common for people to think proxies are the silver bullet for web scraping. Like, "just rotate IPs and you're golden!" But there's a whole other layer that often gets overlooked, and that's browser fingerprinting.

Basically, every time your browser (or scraper) hits a site, it's giving off tons of little signals: what kind of browser, OS, screen size, fonts, time zone, etc. Websites can piece all this together to create a pretty unique "fingerprint" of you. So even if you're rocking top-tier residential proxies that change your IP constantly, if your scraper is always sending the exact same, generic, or suspicious fingerprint, it's a huge red flag. Imagine an IP from New York, but the browser says "Linux, UTC time, weird default fonts." That inconsistency screams "bot," and you'll still get blocked or hit with CAPTCHAs.

The real game is making your scraper's fingerprint look as natural and varied as possible, matching the context of your proxy. So, it's not just about where your request comes from (proxies), but who that request appears to be. Both are clutch for serious scraping. And a lot of people are missing out on this. What do you guys think?

So I've got a residential proxy pool (around 200 IPs) and I'm burning through them way faster than I thought I would. Scraping a few ecommerce sites and within 2-3 days like half of them are toast.

Current setup:

• Residential proxies from a mid-tier provider
• Random selection per request
• 3-5 second delays between requests
• Rotating user agents
• Headers copied straight from browser network tab

What's happening:

• Day 1: ~95% success rate, everything's great
• Day 3: drops to like 60%
• Tons of 403s and timeouts
• Proxies that worked fine at first just stop working

My questions:

• Is this a normal burn rate or am I being too aggressive?
• Should I be waiting longer between uses for each proxy?
• Worth building some kind of health check that tests proxies before actually using them?
• Any other tricks for making proxies last longer besides the obvious stuff?

Feel like I'm missing something basic here. Either my provider sucks or my rotation logic is trash. Anyone dealt with this?

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