You might be wondering what I mean by Residential proxies and what makes them essential to selling sneakers. Basically, residential proxies can simply be defined as IPs that are directly connected to an internet service provider that gives IPs to residential areas.
Types of Residential Proxies to Sneakerheads
To explain it better, there are three basic types of proxies that are important in the business of selling sneakers. The proxies are datacenter, residential, and shared. Most people have moved from shared IPs as a result of several subnet bans. Datacenter proxies are becoming less popular too because of their vulnerability. These two proxies are quite easy to detect because of their low-level security, and shared proxies are fruits of the cloud server providers that we are all using. What the retailers and sites had to do was block the subnets that are connected to these cloud server providers, which is the platform for our bots. By doing that, they were able to reduce the activity of bots on their sites.
This action really made a significant drop in the bot activities on retailer's sites by merely blocking access to any IP that is connected to these cloud services. There is no ISP that is controlling any datacenter or shared proxy, so it made these proxies to become open to anyone that is curious enough to look around.
Importance of Residential Proxies
This is the main reason why residential proxies became popular and widely used. The IPs that are given out by residential proxies are connected to an ISP. An ISP is basically the company that you pay to have access to the internet in your home, for example, AT&T, Comcast, and some other ones. The difference is that these companies have their own personal IP blocks that they share with their customers. You might be wondering what we stand to gain from residential proxies. The advantage of residential proxies is that it makes it more difficult for online retailers to detect our bot activities, and it gives us more privacy and security.
To make it more realistic, let's assume there is new Yeezy release, and we all know the number of legitimate users that will be online on the day of release trying to cop one before it's sold out. You can be sure Adidas will be monitoring these activities; they will see that most connections are from residential IPs from homes across the world, they will also see mobile connections from phones and not forgetting datacenter connections that are mostly from bots. If I am Adidas, it will be a reasonable thing to block all datacenter IPs from accessing my site. I hope you now understand the reason why the data center is no more reliable. Datacenter IPs are the easiest to detect, and they are generally in groups that are known as subnets. Although, it is not possible for them to block all subnets, because as vulnerable as datacenter IPS are, there are private owners that are still using them, so Adidas is well aware of this, and all they can do is to scrutinize the owner to make sure it is not a bot.
Adidas has been quite successful in blocking datacenter IPs, they've not been able to block all, but most. Their next line of action is to face residential IPs, and this is where it gets interesting for us and complex for them and other online retailers. Let's imagine a situation; you and I both know that the man living beside our house is not using a sneaker bot, but the thing is we are both connected to the same internet service provider.
Now let’s assume I’m using my neighbor’s IP on my bot, and we are both trying to cop a new Yeezy release as fast as possible. Adidas will be able to see the connections on their server, but they won't be able to get to me. This is because there are a lot of similar connections happening at the same time around the world. Do you think Adidas will go ahead and start blocking everyone, including my neighbor that is just trying to refresh the splash page and get his sneakers? I do not think so.
Endnote
Adidas won't start banning all connections on their server because we are potential customers. This is the same reason why they can't ban a subnet because there is always that private owner that is just trying to get his sneakers. So, it's quite difficult for Adidas to block their potential customers that are using residential proxies. It is possible, but I don't think they are ready to spend their valuable time on that, they still need to pick out individual IPs on datacenter and shared proxies among the subnets. This makes residential proxies to be the only option for us sneakerheads. If you are looking for good residential proxies to buy, there are some amazing ones that I can recommend. You can check out these guys @BoostedProxies, @ProxyCartel @UnlockedProxies.
