Are you a retail business owner seeking to expand your online presence? Are you trying to enter into a niche market? Do you already have an online store but want to attract more traffic? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, having an Amazon store could be an excellent option for you. Having an Amazon storefront is an easy way to improve brand visibility, boosting customer engagement, and maximizing sales.
However, being the most popular e-commerce destination, the Amazon marketplace is heavily competitive. So, how does a seller maintain an edge over their competition?
As Michael LeBoeuf would say, “A happy customer is the best business strategy.” Monitoring your product’s reviews is incredibly useful to assess customer satisfaction and identifying areas of improvement. However, the benefits of review analysis are not restricted to your own reviews. Your competitors’ reviews are a gold mine of information and are incredibly useful in identifying your own strengths, understanding loopholes in your products, and predicting upcoming market trends.
Read on to explore more about how you can use web extraction techniques to make the best of your competition’s reviews and improve your own product line-up.
Why are Amazon reviews so important?
1. Shoppers love online reviews:
Whether one is casually looking at lawnmowers or looking for an anniversary present online, product reviews heavily influence shopping decisions. And for a good reason. Shopping online can be scary, and there is something really reassuring about reading about somebody’s pleasant experience with a certain product.
In fact, 84% of online shoppers find online testimonials as reliable as recommendations from a close friend or family member. And for this reason, ensuring great reviews can work wonders for a seller’s Amazon algorithm and help build trust among their customer base.
2. Make the best of the oncoming traffic:
Amazon enjoys the lion’s share of the e-commerce market. This gives the sellers a great opportunity to boost their brand’s visibility at little or no added cost. A positive review goes a long way in making a good impression on new shoppers.
3. Product reviews help you understand general demands:
It can be quite puzzling for even the most experienced sellers to gauge the upcoming market trends. However, paying attention to customer reviews of products can help identify new areas of growth. Many customers leave product requests and recommendations in their reviews. Smart sellers are quick to address these demands and gain the upper hand over their competition.
How can you gain the advantage with the help of review scraping?
User-generated content such as customer reviews is the most authentic indicator of a business’s performance. However, when a seller receives thousands of reviews every day, it can be challenging to manually keep track of customer feedback.
So, how does one make the best of this inflow of customer data? Review scraping is the most effective way of collecting and analyzing customer feedback. This method yields two distinct advantages:
1. Dive deep into customer feedback:
Satisfying your customers is crucial to your business’s success. While it can challenging to keep track of all your reviews, especially if you’re a fairly big brand, using a review scraper can ease some of your burdens. The right scraper can help you assess your customers’ overall satisfaction and help you identify any specific aspects of your product that need improvement.
For instance, a vendor selling shoes could scrape his reviews to understand any recurring feedback about some particular features of his products. This could be the design, fit, or even the prices. He could then use this fresh set of insights to deliver a better user experience.
2. Makes competitor analysis easy:
Whether you are a veteran seller or a novice, you can definitely benefit from analyzing your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses. Manually scraping through pages and pages of reviews would take a lot of time and effort. The right review-scraper can make short work of heaps of customer feedback to generate a useful database of quantifiable information. A seller could analyze this dataset further to identify probable areas in which he could grow his own business.
For example, let us go back to the shoe vendor who would now like to expand his business to other areas of the footwear marketplace. If he were to scrape his competition’s reviews, he could identify certain gaps in his own product-line; maybe his brand didn’t have too many options for women’s shoes. Now, he could invest more resources into developing a brand-new line of women’s shoes which would make his brand appeal to a larger audience.
So, how do you get started with review scraping?
You can use review scraping by taking either of the two directions: you may choose to build your own Amazon review scraper from scratch using Python or engage the services of data science experts such as the ones at Datahut.
While building your own review scraping can feel rewarding, one can expect to run into some challenges while getting started. If one does not account for these challenges while building an Amazon scraper, it can make for a rather frustrating experience.
Some of these factors make it difficult to scrape Amazon pages:
Amazon implicitly discourages web-scraping and makes its pages particularly tricky to scrape
Amazon servers can detect scrapers and block them from accessing the site’s pages
Amazon page-structures can be pretty diverse and can derail scrapers that are not advanced enough.
Alternatively, you could save a lot of your precious time and efforts by outsourcing your review scraping requirements to Datahut! Our seasoned data scientists are the leaders in their industry and are guaranteed to build the perfect solutions to all your review-scraping needs.
Summary:
Amazon is a hot favorite among online shoppers. For any seller on the e-commerce platform, ranking high on the product listings is highly desirable for various reasons. However, the Amazon marketplace is heavily competitive. So, how can one head ahead of their competitors while saving resources and time? Review scraping is your new best friend.