Guides, Tutorials & Insights
Learn about residential proxies, web scraping, data collection strategies, and industry best practices from the Shifter team.
How to Tell When a Site Is Serving You Fake or Blocked Content
The dangerous scraping failure is not the 403 you can see, it is the 200 OK full of junk. How to detect soft blocks, honeypots, and poisoned data.
Chris Collins · July 31, 2026 Web Scraping Best Practices: How to Collect Data Without Harming the Sites You Scrape
Responsible web scraping: honor robots.txt, rate-limit, back off on 429s, cache, and scrape off-peak. Being a good citizen also gets you blocked far less.
Chris Collins · July 27, 2026 How to Use Residential Proxies for eBay Listing and Seller Data Collection
eBay's sold listings are the closest thing to a public price oracle. How to collect listing and seller data accurately, per marketplace, with proxies.
James Meadow · July 19, 2026 How to Scrape Amazon Product Data (Prices, Reviews, Rankings) with Proxies
A practical guide to scraping Amazon product data, prices, reviews, and rankings, per marketplace, and why residential proxies are what make it work.
Chris Collins · July 13, 2026 How to Cut Proxy Bandwidth Costs When Scraping at Scale
Residential proxies bill by the gigabyte, and a naive scraper wastes most of its bytes. Nine practical ways to cut proxy bandwidth costs without losing data.
Matt Brown · July 11, 2026 How to Scrape Local Business Data (Google Maps and Directories) with Proxies
Local listings, ratings, and rankings are served by location, so you only see them right from inside the city. How proxies fix local business data collection.
Matt Brown · July 8, 2026 The Best Web Scraping Tools in 2026
A practical guide to the best web scraping tools in 2026, by layer: libraries, browser automation, no-code scrapers, managed APIs, and the proxy layer.
Chris Collins · July 1, 2026 Common Residential Proxy Mistakes That Trigger Detection
Good residential proxies and still getting detected? Most residential proxy detection is self-inflicted. The common config mistakes, and how to fix each.
Matt Brown · June 25, 2026 How to Build a Dataset with Web Scraping
A practical guide to building clean web-scraped datasets: pipeline stages, freshness, deduplication, and why blocks and geo-gaps silently bias your data.
Chris Collins · June 23, 2026