Sneaker proxies can be a mystery, especially when you don’t know exactly when you should use them. Many sneakerheads, however, have already figured this out. So every time you cop without a sneaker proxy, you are putting yourself at a disadvantage.
We will uncover some of the secrets of sneaker proxies here and provide you with five reasons you should use sneaker proxies.
What are sneaker proxies?
Sneaker proxies are a type of intermediary server perfected to work with sneaker vendors and ensure maximum success while copping sneakers. At first glance, nothing stops you from using regular proxies to cop sneakers, so there might not be a good enough reason to use specialized ones. So, to understand the benefits of sneaker proxies, we need to delve deeper into its component parts.
All proxies, in essence, are intermediary servers that can route your connection and change the IP address while doing so. As a result of this process, sneaker websites cannot identify your original connection. Therefore, it is harder for them to block your bot from copping all the valuable sneakers.
Now, these intermediary servers aren’t all created equal, and the IP addresses provided differ in many respects. Over time sneakerheads discovered that private residential proxies work best as sneaker proxies.
Residential proxies differ from other types because IP addresses originate from ordinary homes and are verified by internet service providers (ISPs). All of them are unique, so your sneaker bot will look like any other internet user.
Other types of proxies, such as datacenter, are generally faster, but lack legitimacy because their IP addresses aren’t verified by ISPs and look similar as many of them come from a single machine. Therefore, residential proxies are superior for sneaker copping.
Both types of proxy connections can be shared with other users or employed only for your needs. In the latter case, proxies are called private or dedicated, and such an approach reduces the risk of bans. It is especially important while copping sneakers because careless actions of others can ruin a purchasing session for you.
Additionally, sneaker proxies are tested with vendors to ensure that the connection works as perfectly and that there are no bans already. Often, sneaker proxies are tested for specific brands or websites. For example, there are subtypes of Nike, Adidas, or Shopify sneaker proxies.
If you don’t know which sneaker brand or site you will be targeting, it is best to choose a general sneaker proxy. With such proxies, you will have an advantage against other sneakerheads.
Highest legitimacy
Sneaker proxies get tested to work with sneaker sites and use the most legitimate proxy type. So, it is only natural they bring the highest legitimacy to your sneaker copping. Other proxies might be well-performing but can be banned quickly or, even worse, blacklisted before you even start copping.
If you don’t choose sneaker proxies, you will risk exposing your copping practices to sneaker sites, which leads to money and time being wasted. You will have to buy new IP addresses and sometimes even register new accounts on those websites. Better be safe and ensure the highest legitimacy.
Relevant locations
Most sites deny purchases or access to their website from IP addresses not in a list of approved countries. For example, purchasing from Nike.com with an IP address from an unsupported country would not be possible.
Therefore, you can’t make a purchase even if the proxy is perfectly capable and well functioning, but the location is unsupported. Additionally, some sites require that your shipping address and IP address would coincide, so the choice of location cannot be random.
Best performance
While sneaker proxies aren’t necessarily the best performing for some tasks (for example, high data-intensity web scraping), they are certainly the best at what they do. Good providers weed out servers performing poorly on sneaker sites and only sell proxies that can perform flawlessly.
One way to ensure good performance is to use servers that have their physical location near the website’s servers. Using an IP address from another continent will have a significantly slower connection time than a sneaker proxy server located in the same city.
Good sneaker proxy providers target the best locations all the time and automatically, so you do not have to bother about it yourself. Sometimes sneakerheads will need even faster speeds, so they might use datacenter proxies to increase it.
However, you need to know what you are doing as most sites ban the IP addresses of datacenter proxies fast. Knowledge of where you can use datacenter proxies is found only in closed cookgroups. So it is best to use well-performing residential proxies as this strategy is more profitable in the long run.
Efficient rotation
All the characteristics of sneaker proxies are adjusted for copping, but there is one more step to go further – rotation. It simply means that you change IP addresses every time it’s needed. Such a feature is commonly implemented by using various proxy switchers or integrated with automation software.
However, quality sneaker proxy providers ensure that their proxies rotate automatically, so you would not need to bother about how to do it efficiently. Such a feature demands a network of IP addresses adjusted for sneaker copping.
Scalability
Last but not least, there is the need for growth in your projects. Whether you rotate your proxies or not, the time will come when you will need to catch more drops than before. Not using sneaker proxies becomes problematic in such a scenario.
You might get lucky and find a few ordinary proxies that work on sneaker sites, but things change once you need more sneaker proxies. Risks of getting banned IPs or unwanted locations increases with the growing number of IPs. Scaling your projects becomes a headache you could avoid with sneaker proxies.
Conclusion
All the reasons to use sneaker proxies reflect the unique problems they solve for committed sneakerheads or anyone else in sneaker copping. I am sure you have experienced these problems yourself, and you know the solution now – use quality sneaker proxies.
