Keeping an Eye on Prices in Other Countries
The short version: plenty of online shops show different prices, deals and stock depending on which country, and sometimes which city, you seem to be in. Maybe you sell online and want to know what rivals charge elsewhere, or you're tracking what one product costs in a few countries. Either way, you need to look from an IP address in each place, and to spread repeat checks over many IPs. Proxies handle both jobs.
This guide covers which proxy type to start with, why location matters so much for prices, and how to collect public prices without overdoing it, within each shop's terms of service and the law. For the product details, see our proxies for price monitoring page.
Written and kept up to date by the people who run Budget Proxies. If a step no longer matches what you see on your screen, let us know through the contact page.
What this guide walks you through
- Why you and a shopper abroad see different prices
- Start cheap, then step up if you need to
- Price-checking situations at a glance
- Is price tracking allowed? Some ground rules
- Getting your first price check running
Why you and a shopper abroad see different prices
Shops work out roughly where you are from your IP address and adjust what they show you: the currency, whether tax is included, which promotions are running and how much stock appears. A price you see from home might simply be wrong for the country you're actually interested in.
Send each check through a residential proxy, an IP from a real home connection, in the country you care about, and you see what a local shopper sees. For big batches of checks on shops that don't mind server traffic much, datacenter proxies (IPs that belong to hosting companies) get the job done for less money.
Start cheap, then step up if you need to
Datacenter: lots of products for less
If you're checking a large catalogue on shops with light bot protection (the automatic checks that look out for software visitors), datacenter proxies (from $2.49/GB) cover a lot of ground cheaply and quickly.
Residential: when the local price has to be right
When you need the exact local price, or the shop looks closely at traffic from servers, residential proxies (from $3.98/GB) show you the genuine local page. On the hardest marketplaces, Residential Premium, our curated residential pool, raises your success rate: the share of checks that come back with a proper page.
Price-checking situations at a glance
Find the situation nearest to yours and use the type beside it as your starting point. Per-request means a fresh IP for each check; sticky keeps one IP for a short while, which suits looking at several pages of the same shop in a row.
| Situation | Type to pick | Rotation | Why we suggest it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Big catalogues, light protection | Datacenter | Per-request | Covers lots of products for less |
| Prices for one country or region | Residential | Sticky | The price a local shopper is shown |
| Well-protected marketplaces | Residential Premium | Sticky | Better success on tough sites |
| Prices inside phone apps | Mobile (4G/5G) | Auto-rotate | Seen from a real mobile network |
Is price tracking allowed? Some ground rules
Tracking prices politely is kinder to the shop's servers, and it gives you cleaner numbers:
- Collect only prices that anyone can see, and follow each shop's terms of service and its robots directives (the robots.txt file that tells automated visitors what they may fetch).
- Go slowly, and turn on rotation so the checks are shared out and no one IP gets overworked.
- Set the proxy to the country you want prices for, so the currency and amounts come through correctly.
- If the shop offers an official API or product feed (a tidy data source made for this purpose), use it, and keep copies of pages so you don't download unchanged ones again.
To be clear, a proxy can't make any shop let you in, and the shop's own terms still apply.
Getting your first price check running
One money tip before you buy: plain HTTP requests, which fetch just the page's code, use far less data than a headless browser (a full web browser running without a window). Estimate both on the proxy calculator, compare what each type costs on the pricing page, then buy now. Our proxies connect over HTTP/HTTPS or SOCKS5, you log in with a username and password or an IP whitelist (a list of your own addresses that need no password), there are 55+ countries to pick from, and delivery happens straight away.
Questions beginners ask
Not sure what to buy? Start at step 1
Here are our four types, from the lowest price per GB upwards. Try a small amount of the first one that could work for your project, and only move up a step if a quick test lets you down.
Sites without bot protection, big batches of public pages, automation and SEO tools
Protected sites, ad checks, market research and seeing what one place really sees
Apps and platforms built for phones, plus testing your own mobile app
Well-guarded sites, where a better success rate is worth the higher price
Small first order? Datacenter from $2.49/GB · billed on the data you actually move · ready straight away · 30 days to use it · no traffic logs.
What to read next
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Read the guide →Got a particular job in mind?
Ready to try your first proxy?
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