Risks of data harvesting without proxies

Any business that does not use proxies provided by a trusted proxy website poses risks to its own activities. Miscalculated pricing policies, flawed analysis of competitors’ offerings, obsolete and unworkable datasets, time-consuming SMM are examples of negative consequences. Today, we focus on several domains that are the most prone ones to mistakes without geo targeted proxies. Namely, online commerce, finance, and staffing.

 E-commerce 

To make data-driven decisions and build reliable projections, e-commerce and m-commerce businesses require the following datasets:

• Pricing policies and practices used by their rivals;
• Consumer feedback, user reviews, and rankings, both native and published by third-party aggregators; 
• Sales quantities and PoS-related data.

High-quality and actionable datasets of this type cannot be obtained manually. This process needs to be smartly automated in order to be accurate and not to be time-consuming. Manual approaches are slow, not immune to human error, and imprecise. Here is a list of likely consequences:

1. Relying on outdated pricing data puts businesses at risk of selling too cheap or expensive. If prices fluctuate more frequently than you manage to collect them, your business will inevitably get harmed;   
2. Customer reviews are the main guideline for many clients. One needs to quickly collect them to gain insights in prevailing patterns. Hence, speed is also of utmost importance;  
3. To sell something, one needs to buy something at wholesale prices. More than that, one needs to purchase optimal quantities in order not to waste resources on items in low demand. Automated data-harvesting providing your with sales data on time is a key to success in this respect. 

All these dimensions require you to use special utility programs to send requests and receive well-structured datasets. Without geo targeted proxies, any automated data-harvesting activities will be quickly detected and stopped by blacklisting you outright. 

Finance 

In the domain of finance, the situation resembles eCommerce, with such valuable Big Data sets as:

• Stock trade data; 
• News concerning specific sectors, indices, or securities; 
• Social media stats covering specific shares or commodities. 

Similarly, if one does not apply the potential of geo targeted proxies and trusted proxy websites to these datasets, consequences might be grave:

• Wrong decisions concerning portfolio management; 
• Social sentiment not taken into consideration for long-term investment planning; 
• Failure to react to news stories on time. 

Staffing and recruitment agencies 

Any HR specialist knows that to identify industry trends and offer relevant perks and competitive salaries, lots of data have to be carefully examined. Correspondingly, the range of regularly collected datasets includes:

1. Individual-level data extracted from social media platforms. It may encompass skills, fields of expertise, track records, certificates, language proficiency, knowledge of software, readiness to relocate, and salary expectations;
2. Enterprise-level info, encompassing numbers of specialists currently employed, pools of those actively searching for jobs, median salaries, perks, etc.

What makes matters even more complicated in this respect is that social platforms are enormously powerful, paranoid about leaks and hacking attempts, and have all relevant safeguards in place. Thus, even for legit and law-abiding data harvesters, obstacles may quickly get insurmountable unless they reach out to trusted proxy websites for geo targeted proxies.    

With Astro you can solve almost any challenge across these industries. There will be nor problems with locations, rotation, and optimal intervals to mask your data-harvesting activities. Proxy free trial is available for newcomers!