Location · FR
France proxies
France proxies route requests through French residential and ISP IPs, with city targeting in Paris, Lyon and Marseille. French retail runs on a legal calendar of two sales periods a year and French-language rules for every commercial page, both of which shape how you schedule and parse a collection.
http://USERNAMEhttp://USERNAMEhttp://USERNAMEThe short answer
- The soldes happen twice a year, in winter and summer, for four weeks each under Article L310-3 of the Commercial Code, with start dates fixed by ministerial order. Raise your collection cadence for those weeks.
- The 1994 Toubon law makes French mandatory in the offer, presentation and description of goods and services, so expect
fr-FRcontent and French number formats even on international brands' French shops. - 70.3% of people aged 16–74 in France bought online in the three months before Eurostat's 2025 survey.
- There is no French mobile exit; use residential pools for mobile-sensitive pages and check the device signals your client sends.
Availability
What you can target in France
Read from the live catalog at build time. Country targeting is the _country- token, a metro is the _city- token.
| Plan | Country | City | Notes | From (at 1 TB) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
ARC Basic Rotating ISP | 3 metros | €0.59 / GB(€0.75 list) | ||
ARC Fast Rotating residential | 3 metros | €1.12 / GB(€2.00 list) | ||
ARC Ultra Premium residential | 3 metros | €2.17 / GB(€3.50 list) | ||
ARC Mobile Mobile 4G/5G | No mobile exits in France | — |
Metros in France
- Paris
_city-paris - Lyon
_city-lyon - Marseille
_city-marseille
Static ISP IPs are held per region rather than drawn from every country; check current stock on the static IPs page and in the dashboard.
Local work
What teams collect in France
Price monitoring
Fashion and home retailers cut prices at the opening of each soldes period and again in later markdown rounds. Snapshot daily during the four weeks and weekly outside them; fashion price monitoring covers size-level availability.
Real estate & jobs
Classifieds such as Leboncoin and portals such as SeLoger carry most rental and sale listings. Paris, Lyon and Marseille are separate markets with separate rent controls in parts of each, so keep the city on every row.
Travel fares
High-speed rail between Paris, Lyon and Marseille competes with domestic flights and coaches. SNCF's standard and low-cost services sit side by side; the rail and bus fares deep dive explains how to sample them.
Market research
French-language forums, review sites and news comment sections are a distinct conversation from English-language coverage of the same brands. Social listening covers collecting public posts only.
Reviews & changes
Hotel and restaurant reviews in Paris are written in many languages; filter by review language before scoring sentiment, or visitor reviews can drown out the local signal. See hospitality reviews.
In depth
The France market, for data teams
Soldes: the legal sales calendar
France regulates when retailers may advertise 'soldes'. Service-Public, the government's official guidance site, sets out the rules: two periods a year, in winter and summer, each lasting four weeks, governed by Article L310-3 of the Commercial Code, with start dates and times fixed by ministerial order.
For a price series this produces two predictable structural breaks a year. Tag each observation with whether it falls inside a soldes window, and store the struck-through reference price where the page shows one. Discount depth during soldes is a metric in itself; discounts outside the window are usually labelled differently ('promotion', 'offre') and should be kept apart.
French-language rules and parsing French pages
Article 2 of the loi n° 94-665 of 4 August 1994 (the Toubon law) makes French obligatory in the designation, offer, presentation and description of goods and services, and in written, spoken and audiovisual advertising. In practice the French shop of an international brand is fully French, which is good for consistency and means your parser must handle French formats.
| Setting | French value | Parser note |
|---|---|---|
| Accept-Language | fr-FR | fr-BE, fr-CH and fr-CA editions are separate markets |
| Number format | 1 234,56 € | Thousands separator is often a narrow no-break space (U+202F) |
| Tax label | TTC / HT | Consumer prices labelled TTC; B2B shops may quote HT |
| Date format | DD/MM/YYYY | Month names in French: janv., févr., mars … |
| Time zone | Europe/Paris | CET/CEST |
Online shopping in France, measured
| Measure | France | EU 27 | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bought online in the last 3 months (16–74) | 70.3% | 62.4% | Eurostat, 2025 |
| Bought online in the last 3 months, 2024 | 69.3% | 60.2% | Eurostat |
| Individuals using the internet | 88.7% | — | World Bank / ITU, 2024 |
Marketplaces such as Cdiscount and Fnac's marketplace host third-party sellers next to the retailer's own offers, so the same product page can show several prices. Record the seller and whether it is the platform itself.
The CNIL and the Informatique et Libertés law
The Commission nationale de l'informatique et des libertés (CNIL) is France's independent data protection authority. It applies the GDPR together with the loi n° 78-17 of 6 January 1978 on data processing, files and freedoms, which predates the GDPR by four decades and was updated to work alongside it.
Collecting public prices and listings raises few personal-data questions; collecting reviewer names, seller identities of private individuals on classifieds, or contact details does. Keep those out unless you have a clear purpose, and follow our acceptable use policy. This is not legal advice.
FAQ
Questions
Something not covered? Write to contact@arcproxies.io.
Can I target Lyon or Marseille instead of Paris?
Yes, all three are city targets on the rotating pools. Toulouse, Bordeaux, Lille and Nice are not; use France country targeting for those.
Are there French mobile proxies?
No. ARC Mobile covers Germany, the UK, the US and Japan only. For mobile-web pages in France, use residential exits with a mobile user agent and viewport.
When do French soldes start?
The dates are set by ministerial order and published on Service-Public before each period; check the current order rather than hard-coding a date. Each period runs for four weeks.
Why do my French prices come back with odd spaces?
French formatting uses a narrow no-break space as the thousands separator and a comma for decimals. Normalise U+202F and U+00A0 to nothing, then swap the comma for a dot before casting to a number.
Sources & review
Last reviewed by the ARC Proxies team. Prices are read from the live catalog at build time.
- [1]Service-Public.fr (DILA): Soldes : règles à respecter
- [2]Légifrance: Loi n° 94-665 du 4 août 1994 relative à l'emploi de la langue française, article 2
- [3]CNIL: La loi Informatique et Libertés
- [4]Eurostat: Internet purchases by individuals (2020 onwards) [isoc_ec_ib20]
- [5]World Bank (ITU data): Individuals using the Internet (% of population) – France
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