What Is a Shopee Proxy?
Shopee is a multinational e-commerce platform operating in East Asia and Latin America. It implements a hybrid business model combining B2C and C2C marketplace operations.
Shopee was launched in 2015 and by Q4 2017 it ousted Lazada taking its place as Malaysia’s third most popular e-commerce app for mobile devices. It shows decent growth of a number of users and unique visits, with over 200 million app downloads.
As a popular e-commerce platform, Shopee contains tons of data about product descriptions, pricing, promotions, special offers and many more valuable insights. Merchants wishing to analyze this information and get competitive advantage, manage multiple account or bypass geo restrictions face a high risk of being banned.
But they can overcome these hurdles with the help of a Shopee proxy server. Proxy servers for Shopee are intermediaries that sustain your anonymity and enable automation when accessing the Shopee website. As in other use cases, proxy servers hide your IP address and location and replace them with their own details.
Why Do You Need a Proxy for Shopee?
Here are the main reasons underlying needs in proxy servers for Shopee:
- Enhanced anonymity and security. Since Shopee is an e-commerce platform, it inherently deals with credit card and other confidential details of booths merchants and buyers. Some wrongdoers may seek opportunities to access users’ payment details thorough their IP address. In this case using proxy servers that conceal your true IP is a reasonable way to ensure your anonymity and thus improve security: it will be much more difficult for ill-wishers to bypass such protection and steal your personal data.
- Bypassing geo-restrictions. Shopee is strictly linked to the countries it operates it. More over, its product offerings vary from country to country, so there is a chance you won’t be able to shop products offered in Singapore from Taiwan or Brazil. So, if you went on a business trip and want to order some items to be delivered by the time you return home, or if you want to shop from another country for any other reason, Shopee proxy servers are the best solution to bypass geo restrictions and shop online without any limitations.
- Web-scraping Shopee data. As a source of extensive commercial data on product pricing, descriptions, promotions, etc., Shopee is a bonne bouche for merchants, who would like to get valuable insights in competitors information to better build their own commercial strategy. However, analyzing these big data manually would take too much time, and automation is a decent approach to this task. But as any advanced platform, Shopee sooner or later blocks automated tools that extract data from the website. And here rotating proxies will save the day — with IPs changed regularly when sending requests during scraping, it’s almost impossible to be banned by the platform.
Best Proxies for Shopee
When you use proxies for scraping Shopee public data, it’s crucial to avoid ban. That is why we recommend using rotating proxies — as in this mode, the IP address of a proxy server is changed regularly, it features the lowest probability of being detected by the Shopee’s anti-spam system that is able to discover proxy traffic.
When choosing between residential and datacenter proxies, rely on the following considerations. Residential proxies ensure the highest security for Shopee users, as they offer IP address of real-life gadgets, This way, it’s virtually impossible for Shopee anti-spam system to distinguish them from common users. Proxies generated by datacenters are cheaper and work faster.
How to scrape Shopee product data
Basically, most scraping solutions are based on accessing Shopee’s Open API. Scraping API:
- saves you time and effort through automating Shopee data extraction;
- helps gain valuable business insights based on analyzed product listings and prices;
- can track real-time prices and conduct market analysis in order to optimize sales strategies and get the competitive advantage.
Advanced users good at coding can write such tools themselves in Java, PHP, cURL or Python to create a tool up to their expectations. You can find an article of their developer experience on Medium, GitHub, or Reddit, so if you know how to handle open-source projects, you can adjust their tools to your Shopee needs, contribute to them or even develop your own utility.
If you’ve made up your mind to create your own solution, you’ll most probably need such libraries as Requests, BeautifulSoup, Selenium WebDriver etc.
Large business users can outsource Shopee scraping services to get the solution tailored exactly to their corporate requirements. For example, RetailGators offer script-based scraping of Shopee product rating, description, pricing, specifications, brand, images and other details in accordance with customer’s requirements.
Non-technical users definitely prefer zero-code tools they can use without any programming expertise. Here, it’s also a wide range of software products to choose from, for example:
- Ready-made Shopee Data Scraper by X-Byte that supports data scraping and saving in CSV, Excel, or JSON formats, as well as task scheduling with various time intervals;
- Syliner Shopee Data Scraper you can install as a Chrome extension;
- JWS online service, where you specify the required parameters and get the scraped deliverables without even installing a scraper;
- and many others.
Main steps for Shoppe web-scraping:
1. Choose a Shopee scraper that fits your data needs.
2. Decide, what data you need to scrape, use a template, if a solution supports any, and fill in the scraping parameters.
3. If required, specify keywords and the country.
4. Run the scraping process and wait until the task is complete.
5. Make sure the process comes to end without any errors; restart it, if necessary.
6. Export the extracted data into Excel, CSV, or other formats.
Conclusion
Web-scraping Shopee data is a reliable and state-of-the-art method intended to extract valuable business insights about e-commerce in the East Asia and Latin America. However, to exclude probability of bans and other penalties by the e-commerce platform, be sure to use residential rotating proxies that will make your scraping anonymous and safe.
Frequently Asked Questions
Please read our Documentation if you have questions that are not listed below.
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Is it legal to scrape Shopee?
Yes, it is legal to scrape Shopee’s publicly available content. But to be on the safe side, use reliable premium proxies that will help bypass its anti-spam system rotating IP addresses and adjusting the request rate to the humanlike speed.
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Does Shopee scraping support retrieval of product reviews written by users?
Yes, it is possible to scrape Shopee’s product reviews. It can give valuable information about users’ opinions of the products and help build an informed product strategy.
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How does Scraping API for Shopee work?
Such API sends HTTP requests to the Shopee platform, and then extract the data by parsing the HTML response.
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