Solutions › Brand protection & counterfeit monitoring
Brand protection is the one scraping workload where the images are the payload. Everywhere else on this site, product photos are waste bytes you'd happily drop. Here the photo is the evidence — it's what proves a listing is a copy of your design, not just a similar product, and it's what a marketplace complaint form asks you to attach. That single difference changes the traffic profile, the cost model, and how you should measure success.
It's also a workload that never ends. Listings get removed and reappear under a new seller within days, so the crawl runs at a steady rate for years, not in a burst.
This isn't just for enforcement agencies. Any brand owner with a registered design or trademark ends up doing it in-house, because nobody watches a catalogue as closely as the person whose catalogue it is.
A text-only crawl is measured in kilobytes per record. A listing captured with its full image set is measured in megabytes, and the images are most of it. Plan sizing that works for a price monitor will be off by an order of magnitude here, and you'll find out mid-month.
Two practical points:
Don't filter images out. BotProxy supports per-credential request filters that block URL patterns you never meant to fetch — and blocked requests aren't billed. On most workloads the advice is to cut third-party assets aggressively. Here it's narrower: cut fonts, analytics, tag managers, and ad exchanges — which on a marketplace page can be a real share of the bytes — and leave the CDN that serves the product photos alone.
Fetch each image once. Store a hash alongside it. Marketplaces reuse the same image across many listings and many sellers, so a hash index both skips the re-download and does the matching work for you: the same photo appearing under a second seller is the signal you're looking for.
On a marketplace, geography isn't an access question — it's a question of whether you captured the right thing. Assortment, price, shipping options, and sometimes whether the listing even appears all depend on the IP. A listing that's invisible from a US exit might be the first result from a French one.
This matters more here than in ordinary price monitoring, because the output is used to assert a right that exists in a specific territory. The listing you need to document is the one a buyer in the market where you hold the registration actually sees. Pin the exit country in the login and keep one country per dataset. All locations are included on every plan, so running the same query set from several countries costs nothing extra.
We've also seen servers that answer a US datacenter IP normally and return 403 to a European one. If a marketplace is refusing you outright, match the exit country before debugging anything else.
Every request through BotProxy runs inside a session, and a session holds one exit IP for its lifetime. If you don't supply a session ID, a default session is used and every request leaves from the same address. The session lives in the proxy login:
login + location + SESSIONID
pxu1000-0+FR+px-007 # French exit, worker 7
pxu1000-0+US+px-007 # same worker, US view of the same queryAcross 268 targets in production traffic, 28 show failure rates climbing sharply as the same request volume is concentrated onto fewer exit IPs. The most extreme case went from 2.4% failures spread across the pool to 73.3% concentrated — same target, same requests. What's being enforced is a request budget per address, not a judgment about where the address lives.
Good defaults for this workload:
Large marketplaces run commercial WAFs that fingerprint the TLS and HTTP/2 handshake, so a default Python or Go client is identified as automation before a single header is read. Anti-Detect Mode rewrites the handshake to match a real browser — it's what gets past AWS WAF, Imperva, and Cloudflare fingerprint checks. It's on by default.
Two things to know: it works as a man-in-the-middle, so your client must accept the proxy's certificate. And the browser profile supplies the User-Agent, replacing the one your client sends.
A takedown is a claim you may have to defend, and a scraped page is only useful as evidence if you can say what it looked like, when, and from where. That puts a few requirements on the pipeline that other scraping workloads don't have.
A marketplace block often arrives as HTTP 200 with a page that has no listing on it. If your pipeline validates on status codes, that page gets stored as a successful capture of an empty result — which looks exactly like a listing that was taken down. The consequence here is worse than a gap in a price series: you'll conclude that an enforcement action worked when the listing is still live, and stop watching it.
Check the extracted content instead. A capture with no title, no seller, and no images is a failure regardless of the status code, and it should re-queue rather than close the case.
One more limit, and it's ours rather than technical. This page is written for rights holders monitoring copies of their own registered designs and marks. Complaint tooling can also be pointed at competitors selling lawfully, and we don't want that traffic. The Acceptable Use Policy is the binding version.
Several marketplaces offer rights-holder programmes with their own search, image-matching, and bulk-submission tools — and those are better than anything you'll build by crawling. Use a proxy for the marketplaces that offer nothing, for sites outside any programme, and for the recheck sweeps that tell you whether a removal stuck.
Paste your URL into the live tester and see the real response before creating an account. Every plan includes all locations, Anti-Detect Mode, and the Browser API. You're billed on traffic volume only.
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Licensing boards, Secretary of State business registries, county assessors and recorders. About 1,450 separate government domains, each with its own stack and its own WAF.
Company and professional profiles, directories, and firmographic enrichment — long-running pipelines that re-check the same records on a schedule.
Marketplace and retailer product pages, price history, and stock tracking across many sites at once.
Search result pages by keyword and locale, rank monitoring, and share-of-voice reporting for agencies and in-house teams.
Airline and OTA fare and availability checks, where the price depends on the country the request comes from.
Listing portals plus the county assessor, recorder, and land-record sources that hold the official ownership and tax data.
Marketplace listings and product images collected on a schedule to find copies of your products and document them for takedowns.