The internet has turned the world into a global marketplace. Now, not only you can sell your products in your local region, but anywhere in the world. It’s especially true for software products that can be delivered to customers with just a push of the button. While this is great, it also opens a lot of challenges. One of the biggest challenges that come with serving a global market is the inability to identify your customers. If you do not know your customer’s origin, you cannot effectively target them with proper prices and advertisements. For example, the purchasing power capabilities of customers vary widely depending on their country of origin and you might want to offer lower prices to potential customers from lower-income countries. That’s where a tool like ipstack can help you.
ipstack offers a geolocation API and its global IP database services that can help you identify and locate your website visitors based on their IP address. Since IP addresses are unique to each machine, you can bet that you are getting correct data. It can even identify if a visitor is trying to spoof their IP address, so there is no chance of getting corrupted data here. In this article, we are going to take a quick look at ipstack and find out what it has to offer us.
ipstack IP to Geolocation APIs: What Are the Advantages?
As I mentioned above, the IP to geolocation APIs offered by ipstack can help you identify the location of your visitors. You can use this information to offer location-based prices, discounts, target ads based on location, and much more. You can even customize the whole user experience based on the user location if you wish. The best thing about ipstack and the thing that matters the most is that its data is accurate. Its API covers over 2 million unique locations in more than 200.000 cities around the world. It has partnered with most major ISPs around the world to get you the most accurate results.
And that’s why it caters to more than 100,000 customers around the world. Some of the biggest names in its customer portfolio include Microsoft, Airbnb, Samsung, Activision, and more. But, don’t worry if you are not running an enterprise-level company. In fact, the second biggest advantage of ipstack is that it can serve you irrespective of your size. Whether you are an individual business owner, an enterprise, or anything in between, ipstack has a plan to satisfy your needs.
ipstack API: The Different Modules
The ipstack API consists of multiple modules, all of which serve a specific purpose. Together, they give you a complete picture of your customer so you can deliver a tailored shopping experience. Here are the modules that ipstack brings.
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Location Module
This is the main module of ipstack API. It identifies a visitor’s location thereby giving you access to a set of localization data (country’s flag, language, capital, etc.) to implement geographic restrictions on your site, optimize ad targeting, or deliver user experiences based on the location of your website visitors.
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Currency Module
The currency module gets you an instant and accurate information about the primary currency used in the location along with the currency symbol, currency code, and more. This is quite helpful if you are running an e-commerce website. For example, you can show a currency converter in the checkout page to show how much a product will cost in the customer’s currency.
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Time Zone Module
As the name suggests, the time zone module helps you find out about the time zone your users are located. It consists of information such as such as GMT offset, current user time, time code, and time zone location.
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Connection Module
The connection module can help you log the unique autonomous system number (ASN) of visitors’ ISPs along with their names. You can use this for analytics or setting up filters.
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Security Module
Security Module helps you protect your data. First of all, it identifies any proxy connections which is helpful to filter out junk data. It also identifies IP addresses of crawlers along with the crawler type, threat type, and the threat level. You can use this data to either tighten your security or just outright filter them so they are not able to visit your website.
Other Features
Apart from the above modules, which identify all the major features of ipstack, here are some of the important points that you should know about ipstack.
- It has a robust infrastructure so it can grow as per your needs. It is currently handling between 2 to 3 billion API requests per day. So, you can be sure that your needs can be met.
- All the connections are encrypted with industry-leading 256-bit SSL encryption (HTTPS). So, your data is always safe.
- ipstack supports multiple formats. Based on your choice, the ipstack API can deliver results in JSON or XML format.
- It has a world-class extensive API documentation and a quick start guide that can get you up and running within minutes.
- It can handle both IPv4 and IPv6 data.
- It offers good customer service.
Well, those are the features that you can expect from ipstack. The last thing that is left to discuss is its pricing. And pricing is ipstack’s one of the best selling points as it offers tiered pricing structure which you can choose depending on your needs. That is how ipstack makes sure that even an individual can afford its product. So, without further ado, let’s discuss pricing, shall we?
Pricing and Availability
ipstack’s pricing is one of its biggest strengths. It enables even individuals and small businesses to use the product without breaking the bank. First, there’s a free plan which is a good way to test the service and find out if it’s for you or not. The free plans get you basic features and limit you to 10,000 requests/month. The big missing feature of the free plan is that there is no encryption. So, if you want to safeguard your data, you will have to go for the paid plans. The paid plans start at just $9.99/month ($95.90/year – 20% off). It gives you access to all the features excluding the Bulk Endpoint and the Security Module features. In this plan, you can send 50,000 requests/month. This plan is great for individuals and small businesses.
If you are a big business, you can go for the Professional Plan which costs $49.99/month ($479.90/year – 20% off). It gives you 500,000 requests per month. Excluding the Security Module, you can access all the features in this plan. Finally, there’s the Professional Plus plan which is for enterprise and large businesses that need to handle 2,000,000 requests/month. It will cost you $99.99/month ($959.90/year – 20% off). You get access to all the features in this plan. If your company requires to send even more requests, then you can drop them a line and they will come with tailor-made pricing for your needs.
ipstack: Identify Your Users’ Location to Better Serve Them
In this interconnected world, your products and services are not bound by your country’s borders, it becomes essential to identify your users’ location so you can better serve them. Giving users a more personalized experience not only improves your website but also makes your users feel at home. It leads to better conversion and sales. The first step in doing all that is to identify your users’ location and ipstack is the tool for that. Check it out and let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.
