Why Should You Use Proxies For eBay?

Whether you’re selling or buying online, eBay is one of those platforms that spring to your mind, as there isn’t anything on eBay that you can’t find. Many people have established careers out of their earned money by making even minor eBay deals. While eBay can provide you with countless numerous benefits, it also has

Whether you’re selling or buying online, eBay is one of those platforms that spring to your mind, as there isn’t anything on eBay that you can’t find. Many people have established careers out of their earned money by making even minor eBay deals.

While eBay can provide you with countless numerous benefits, it also has severe drawbacks, including eBay blocking or suspending your accounts and lack of anonymity.

This post will go through some of these drawbacks and how you can overcome them. But let’s provide a brief overview of the eBay platform.

Overview of the eBay Platform

Since its inspection in 1995 in America, eBay has expanded to 32 countries by becoming a worldwide online business that facilitates selling and buying between two consumers or companies and consumers. It provides you the opportunity to buy and sell products, enabling you to make money online from the comfort of your home.

eBay uses a procedure identical to an auction where the consumers can bid on goods. Consumers have the option of buying straight away using the “Buy it Now option, which enables them to skip the bidding process.

What are the drawbacks of eBay?

Exposure of confidential information

When purchasing online products, it’s no secret that we all prefer to keep specific information confidential, for example, where you live. However, it can be problematic on eBay since if the seller has your shipping information in their database, they will know who you are and where you reside.

You can not also provide a false address, resulting in eBay’s inability to deliver your product, which is certainly not what you want. On the other hand, there can be instances where someone steals your ID and purchases items with your credit card.

It might be the same scenario for sellers, where hackers may take their personal information and impersonate them through phishing tactics.

eBay suspending or banning your account

When it comes to banning or suspending its sellers or buyer accounts,eBay can be one of the notorious platforms. On your part as a buyer or seller, you need to respect eBay’s policies and procedures correctly to avoid any bans. 

However, there can be instances where eBay blocked or suspended you for a reason beyond your control. Regardless of why you’re blocked, recovering your account is virtually a pretty tedious task.

Some of these bans could last forever. Anyway, I’m sure you would want to get rid of these bans if you are already a victim. This is where the proxies can play a vital role, and let’s focus on it in the next section.

Why you should use proxies for eBay?

Now you have gained an overview of how eBay functions. Now is the time to dive deeper into why you need proxies for eBay.

Overcome location restrictions

If you live in a country that has banned eBay, you will need to connect to a proxy in USA or Europe to overcome this restriction.

Another critical aspect of location restrictions worth mentioning is the heated political situation between USA and Russia. Due to conflict, most US trading platforms refuse to trade with their Russian buyers. Hefty shipping costs are another primary reason why US sellers are not interested in Russian buyers.

So Russian buyers can overcome these obstacles by connecting to a US proxy. Furthermore, you can use proxies to overcome location restrictions on participating in auction bidding if eBay has prohibited your country of residence from taking part in it.

Blocked or deleted eBay accounts

When eBay blocks or suspends your account, it bans your IP address from any future interactions with the eBay platform. Other factors that eBay considers are your email address, physical address, device, and name as it appears in your account.

So what the above implies is that if you share a household, the others will not be able to access or even create a brand new account eBay has they share the same public IP address. That is why I said above that eBay may block your account for causes beyond your control. It undoubtedly leads to frustration as you can no longer sell or buy as you used to.

One way of getting over this ban is the use of proxies, as you can browse the web anonymously with proxies. We’ll discuss how you can use them to get over the ban in more detail.

Scraping eBay price data

You may also need to scrape eBay’s price data to discover some of the pricing strategies they use. For such scenarios, you can use a bot to scrape a massive volume of data in a short period. 

However, eBay is likely to bots these bots based on inhuman behavior. Therefore you’ll have to use rotating residential proxies by mimicking human behavior, which we’ll discuss later.

eBay price bidding with bots

You can use automated bots to auto-bid in the auction process, as I have mentioned above. This is where an automated service or a bot automatically bids the final seconds of an auction called auction sniping. There are plenty of online services that do this for you, and you can also download them online.

It is also entirely legal to carry it as it doesn’t violate the rules of eBay.Many members perform it. However, using a pool of proxies to create multiple accounts to automate the bidding process can assure that eBay will not block the bots.

In the next section, you’ll find out how you can go back to eBay after it blocks your account. However, let’s first focus on what you need to do to avoid bans.

Using a proxy to avoid bans on your accounts

One of the significant reasons for eBay to block your account is when you access the same account from multiple IP addresses within a day for purchasing and selling activities. For instance, if you access your eBay account to purchase or sell 100 times a day using different IP addresses, eBay will block your account. 

It’s because it becomes evident for eBay that a human is incapable of carrying out an operation of such a large scale magnitude. So it becomes apparent to eBay that you’re hiding behind a proxy. 

Even in circumstances where you’re not using Proxy, and your IP address is dynamic (due to your ISP providing dynamic IP addresses), it could still result in a ban. As a result, eBay is one of the most challenging digital platforms to deal with.

So then we need to think of an alternative solution which I’ll explain next.

Multiple accounts with proxies

The solution would be to create multiple accounts with proxies by keeping the number of IPs per account for 1-2 proxies. You need to ensure that these IP addresses stay the same and at least consistent without resulting in eBay causing a ban.

You’ll have to get more than different IP addresses as each account needs to be linked to a human theoretically. So if you use similar names, identical email, and home addresses, eBay will map them together and ban all your accounts instead of one.

eBay is stringent as such to ensure that only humans use the platform and not robots. Proxies are also a form of robot that humans operate from behind the scene.

Therefore the ultimate solution to this painful issue is to use rotating residential proxies using tandem with rotating user agents so that you would appear as multiple distinct users. You will also need to have many real email addresses with different names.

Accounts such as these that are not linked to one another are known as Stealth accounts. In other words, accounts that use different names are accessed with unique IP addresses and different browsers.

In the next section, you’ll find out why it’s necessary to create stealth accounts in the first place rather than when eBay blocks you.

Why is it necessary to create stealth accounts in the first place?

Unfortunately, many people realize the importance of stealth accounts only after eBay blocks their accounts, and that time is a little too late. However, there is no other option other than to create a stealth account when you cannot continue your business operations with eBay. 

As we have discussed earlier, a reason for the ban could be that they have pushed too far with the rules in some instances. While in other cases, the reason for the prohibition is beyond your control. For example, you may have used a shared or a public IP address that eBay has already banned.

To recover from such depressing circumstances, you need to get rid of the IP address that you accessed eBay previously. Hence if you try to reproduce your account from the previous IP address, the ultimate result would be another ban.

With a few new IP addresses, you should be able to set up a few stealth eBay accounts and go back into the business.

Scraping data and prices from eBay using proxies

When you’re scraping large quantities of product information, you need proxies. This is because anonymity is crucial in web scraping, and it’s also essential to spread your requests. Scraping from a single IP address (or even a few) will result in eBay blocking that particular IP address very quickly. 

So once again, your saviors are rotating residential proxies. With ProxyScrape, you will have the option of choosing from over 7 million residential proxies with multiple locations across the globe.

With the proxy rotation, ProxyScrape’s network will assign you a random proxy each time you connect to a gateway address. This would ensure that you get the optimum results. 

You could get many more dedicated proxies with reserved IPs and do the same job but with a hefty cost. Scraping across most platforms does not need high-quality addresses, but it necessitates many of them. If you’re using scraping tools or code that sends out many queries, you’ll need a vast pool of IP addresses to disperse them.

What are some of the best practices of using proxies for eBay?

Never use free proxies

Free proxies are a complete no-no, and many users will be tempted to use them since they are free. However, when using free proxies, you’re at mercy in front of the owner who owns the free proxy.

You will expose all your details, including which websites you connect to and the browsers you use, and, more importantly, your original IP address. So in many ways, they could use such information to launch an attack against you.

Furthermore, eBay blacklists quite a large number of IPs. So the free proxy IP that you are about to use might be on that list.

Never use shared proxies

When you use shared proxy IPs, you will be sharing the IP address with many users. So if any of the users commit a notorious act using that IP address, you will no longer be able to use that IP address.

Often you will be tempted to use shared proxies when you see great discount rates. However, you would have to pay a much hefty price later on.

Use Residential Proxies

Since the residential proxies are IP addresses of real household owners, eBay will not be suspicious compared to datacenter proxies. As I have mentioned above, you would need to rotate the proxies.

Also, you need to consider that when using rotating proxies, you need to use the sticky session. Other eBay being an innovative platform may ban you for IP rotation. You can find more about residential proxies in this article.

Conclusion

Now you have learned when to use eBay proxies.eBay is a vast platform for online shopping. Many users use it to make cash by selling on the platform, while others shop through it to avoid the hassle of physical shopping. 

However, since eBay has strict rules, there are chances that your account might be blocked for even minute reasons. Also, you may want to scrape or do a fair amount of shopping through it.

So when creating accounts, we would recommend you use proxies.