Wayfair Proxy

Wayfair’s furniture catalog is deep, variant-heavy, and dynamic. Collections and configurable options (colors, fabrics, finishes, sizes, leg types) frequently alter price, lead time, and shipping method. To gather this data at scale you need more than a large IP pool: you need a mesh that controls identity, geography, and state. Pair residential or mobile exits for interactive flows with efficient data-center IPs for static and known endpoints. Maintain two session modes—short identities for discovery and sticky sessions for detail pages, cart checks, and ZIP-specific delivery quotes. Rotate on milestones (new filter, next page, variant toggle, ZIP change) rather than every request, preserving cookies while limiting exposure per IP.

Geo and locale must match the business question. Delivery windows and in-stock flags change by ZIP code, so route traffic to the country and city of interest and use realistic headers: Accept-Language, time zone, currency, and a stable, modern User-Agent. Track success and latency per ASN and per city to spot pockets of soft-blocking or congestion. Instrument transport separately from application responses so you retry smartly: network timeouts are not the same as 429 throttles or structured “please slow down” pages.

• Identity: cookie jars per worker, capped requests per IP/domain/path, deterministic rotation.
• Routing: per-city targeting, ASN diversity, optional IPv6 and mobile pools for tough markets.
• Client: stable TLS and HTTP/2, realistic fingerprints; headless fleet for complex UI steps only.
• Compliance: respect robots and terms; never bypass authentication or paywalls; minimize PII.

Infinite scroll. Category and search pages often paginate with dynamic cursors rather than simple page numbers. Observe network calls to identify JSON/GraphQL endpoints and the cursor or offset parameters. Use a scroll emulator with viewport events, but prefer direct endpoint harvest once discovered. De-duplicate items by product ID or canonical URL, and guard against “looping” cursors with a seen-cursor set. Apply think-time and a moving average of QPS to keep within polite limits.

Review parsing. Reviews influence conversion and margin choices. Capture per-star distributions, verified-purchase flags, media attachments, helpfulness votes, and recency bins (e.g., last 30/90/365 days). Extract retailer responses and Q&A threads for signals about assembly difficulty, durability, odors, and color accuracy. Normalize into a schema that preserves locale, rating scale, counts, and pagination cursors so you can resume from checkpoints rather than re-crawling.

Image CDN capture. Furniture variants live and die by imagery. Harvest the primary gallery, variant swatches mapped to the exact SKU/options, and any 360/AR assets. Prefer the CDN’s canonical URLs and store size-agnostic identifiers (e.g., tokens before width/quality parameters). Pull alt text and captions when present; they’re useful for accessibility and search features. De-duplicate visually similar images with perceptual hashes so storage and compute budgets stay healthy.

• Anti-dup: MD5 for byte identity; pHash/aHash for near-duplicate frames.
• Integrity: validate image dimensions, content-type, and broken thumbnails before indexing.
• Variant link: persist a map from option → image set (e.g., “Walnut” → gallery IDs).

Category share of shelf. Track presence and rank of your brands across target categories (“TV Stands”, “Sectionals”, “Bar Stools”) by key sort orders (relevance, top-rated, price) and filters (width, upholstery, material). Measure share of top-N slots, median price points, and promo density. Combine with availability to avoid comparing your out-of-stock items to competitors’ in-stock bestsellers.

Margin simulation. Variants alter cost: materials, hardware, packaging size, and carrier surcharges all shift landed margin. Join Wayfair’s price, shipping method, lead time, and dimensions to your BOM and freight curves. Simulate price elasticity by segment (e.g., “fabric sectionals, 80–100 inches”) and identify variant mixes that keep fast delivery while protecting contribution margin. Use review topics (comfort, firmness, wobble, scratches) to avoid pushing variants with high return risk.

Returns policy tests. Return windows, restocking fees, and damage handling affect both conversion and cost. Sample policy disclosures at the PDP and during checkout for selected ZIPs and variants, record the effective terms, and A/B the impact on conversion proxies such as “added to cart” or “viewed similar.” Pair this with packaging insights from reviews (“arrived damaged,” “missing screws”) to prioritize packaging upgrades where they reduce churn.

• KPIs: top-N share, median rank, in-stock ratio by variant, lead-time drift, review sentiment index.
• Playbooks: price/ship window swaps, variant curation, image refresh, assembly guidance updates.
• Governance: data lineage, consent posture, and retention aligned with policy and law.

Evaluate proxy vendors by predictability under realistic load, not IP volume. Define success per workflow (PLP scroll, PDP variant matrix, ZIP availability, reviews) and per market (country, city, ASN). A “successful” call yields a valid JSON/DOM with the expected anchors—product ID, price block, variant matrix—rather than a bare HTTP 200. Run peak tests with human-like pacing and simultaneous markets. Track valid-page yield after retries, not just first-attempt success.

Render stability. For flows that need headless rendering (variant toggles with dynamic price updates, sticky add-to-cart, review tabs), measure time-to-ready, error rates, and memory/CPU per render. Keep renderers minimal: disable unneeded plugins, normalize canvas/fonts, and budget timeouts. Escalate to rendering only for pages that fail structured HTTP harvesting.

Concurrency & pacing. Require per-origin QPS caps, per-ASN concurrency, and city-level routing so you can isolate hot markets. Bake in jittered backoff for 429/5xx and intelligent pool moves when a subnet shows rising soft blocks. Maintain warm sticky sessions for ZIP/variant sequences to avoid paying the startup cost repeatedly.

JSON/Markdown export. Your downstream teams need clean artifacts. Export normalized JSON (product ID, canonical URL, current price, compare-at price, availability, ZIP, delivery window, variant matrix, gallery, review summary, attributes) and a lightweight Markdown dossier for humans (title, hero image, key bullets, price/ship table, top review topics, policy notes). Make exports idempotent and content-addressed so reruns don’t balloon storage.

• Target SLOs: ≥98% success on PLP/API; ≥95% on PDP/variant and ZIP quotes at agreed QPS.
• Data quality: schema validation, required anchors present, stable keys for joins.
• Cost control: price per 1k successful calls and per deduped GB, with clear overage rules.

Bottom line. A Wayfair-optimized proxy mesh blends clean egress, disciplined sessions, and selective rendering with variant-aware parsing and ZIP-level availability checks. With infinite-scroll harvesting, robust review mining, and image CDN diligence—plus exports that teams actually use—you’ll see clearer category share, smarter margin decisions, and fewer surprises from returns and stockouts, all while staying within ethical and legal boundaries.