Guides, Tutorials & Insights
Learn about residential proxies, web scraping, data collection strategies, and industry best practices from the Shifter team.
How to Detect Third-Party Sellers Hijacking Your Listings
A hijacker does not steal your product, they attach to your listing. The signals that give it away, how to watch for them, and what evidence to keep.
James Meadow · September 11, 2026 Building a Competitor Creative Library with Automated Scraping
A creative library is a deduplication and metadata problem, not a download problem. How to build one that stays searchable and stays legal.
Chris Collins · September 10, 2026 Building a Real-Time Competitive Price Feed for Dynamic Pricing
Dynamic pricing is only as good as the feed under it. How to build a competitive price pipeline with freshness, confidence and a safety layer.
James Meadow · September 9, 2026 The Digital Services Act Is Turning Web Observation Into Regulatory Infrastructure
Digital Services Act data access is reshaping platform research. See why controlled web observation and geographic vantage points matter for accountability.
Matt Brown · September 8, 2026 How to Analyze Competitor Assortment and Catalog Gaps
Assortment analysis is a matching problem before it is a comparison. How to enumerate a catalog, match products honestly and separate real gaps from noise.
Chris Collins · September 7, 2026 How to Track Competitor Promotions and Discount Cycles
A promotion is an event with a start and an end, and price snapshots miss both. How to record promotions as events and reconstruct a competitor's calendar.
James Meadow · September 7, 2026 Scraping Social Platforms for Sentiment Analysis Without Bans
Blocks do not just cost you data, they bias the sample your sentiment score is computed from. How to collect social data sustainably and measure the gaps.
Chris Collins · September 6, 2026 The Web Needs a Vantage-Point Standard: Why Public-Web Datasets Should Record Where Data Was Observed
Data provenance should record where web data was observed. Learn why geography, network, device and session context matter for auditable datasets.
James Meadow · September 5, 2026 Using ISP Proxies in Cloud-Based Web Scraping Infrastructure
Your scrapers run in the cloud, and the cloud is the first thing sites block. How to put a fixed ISP egress layer in front of ephemeral workers.
Chris Collins · September 4, 2026