Rotating Proxies vs. Static IPs – Which is best for Costco scraping?
When it comes to scraping or botting websites in general, there is a rule of thumb. If you would be logging into your account, then rotating proxies would put your account in trouble as frequent changes of IP address when logged in will show that you are using a proxy system.
On the other hand, if you are not logged in, the service can only track you via IP, cookies, and other unreliable means that you can fake. For this reason, rotating proxies are the best for scraping Costco. If you try scraping Costco using static IPs, you will get blocked after a few requests as your web scraper would be identified.
Does Costco Allow Scraping of its content?
Costco does not allow the use of web scrapers or any form of bot on its platform. And no, this is not unique to Costco; almost all of the popular e-commerce stores you know do not allow the scraping of its content.
This is because they see scraping as content theft and trying to reap where you did not sow. Aside from this, web scrapers also send too many requests, which would add to their running cost at no advantage to them – it can also hurt their server in some way. For these reasons, they do not allow the scraping of their content.
What are the Best Practices for Scraping Costco?
If there is one piece of advice I would give you when planning to scrape Costco, the advice would be to be nice. This means avoid sending too many requests to their server to avoid overwhelming it. If you can, set delays between requests so that it does not overwhelm their server and if you can carry out your web scraping tasks at night when the amount of requests they get is small compared to daytime.
Another piece of advice is for you to use rotating proxies. If you use static IPs, you will need to take care of IP rotation which is an added work. But with rotating proxies, you will not have to think of IP rotation as that is done automatically for you.