Review Scraping

In today’s digital world, we have huge opportunities to learn all about a company’s reputation or product by just glancing at its reviews. About 70% of modern consumers admit that they carefully search, study, and analyze reviews, and trust businesses with positive feedback more.

Currently, people have access to multiple online resources where customers willingly share their experiences and opinions about various companies, goods, and services. This provides people with a perfect opportunity for scraping customer reviews and using this valuable information to their advantage. Businesses and e-commerce entrepreneurs can benefit from the insights gained to deliver an improved customer experience to their clients. Such giant platforms like Amazon, Yelp, and TripAdvisor aggregate millions of buyers’ opinions about their experiences with any particular company. You can scrape Trustpilot reviews (or feedback), for instance, as well as questions and answers about given goods or services, and from that, you can extract viable information.

At first sight, it may seem that only buyers are interested in reviews when they consider making a purchase, but that’s not true. This kind of user-generated content can work like magic for businesses. Scraping a website and analyzing client data is very helpful for market research, marketing strategies, competitive intelligence, and more. Entrepreneurs can use web scraping services for making knowledgeable, data-driven decisions to grow their business in many ways and gain customer loyalty.

First, you can find out and always stay informed about what your customers like and dislike. With the help of direct responses from your clients, you can figure out your competitive advantage, identify the weak points and improve them. Second, you are free to track the reviews of your competitors’ clients to be well-informed about them and their overall situation in the market. It will help you make a predictive analysis of the market and trends, and adjust your business and service to beat the competition. Tracking customer reviews offers a lot of advantages. At the same time, review scraping works simply: the web scraper goes to review web platforms or websites and extracts all the data that interests you. Then the unstructured data is structured, analyzed, and provided to you in a convenient format.

Every second, new reviews appear on sites all over the internet. There are special review platforms, corporate sites with feedback sections, social media networks; all which allow business accounts with user comments, reviews, blogs, forums, and more. It’s difficult to imagine the real scope and might of the present-day world wide web and it’s simply impossible to scrape all of these reviews manually. More than that, many online resources are currently overloaded with inaccurate or unreliable data. Besides this, it would be extremely time-consuming and costly to manually analyze this data. Modern web automation and machine learning technology allow the usage of effective data scraping tools that can do the job quickly and efficiently in accordance with your requirements. Such an approach to web review scraping will help you dig deep into customer opinions and gain actionable insights for business operation optimization, customer service improvement, and enhance your product or service. It’s essential to remember that negative reviews are as important, and even sometimes more important, than positive ones since they are your source of learning and growth zone indicators.

By scraping reviews and ratings of your business from various web pages, you’ll get an overall understanding of customers’ attitude towards your brand, their loyalty, and their satisfaction. While rating-based evaluation works well for this purpose, you should go deeper than that and check feedback as well. Dissatisfaction or disappointment may be caused not by your product, but by poor packaging or delivery, which may not be your direct competence. However, you should consider how to improve this if it causes low customer satisfaction.

By using web scraping tools to research your competitors, you can understand their strengths and weaknesses, and enhance your business positioning in the market. Try to outperform competitors in the aspects their clients like, and find out their customers’ main pain points and complaints. You can also track the dissatisfied customers and offer them solutions.

When you collect reviews about your business and your competitors, you can compare them and get precious insights about the areas that need improvement, the ways to beat the competition, the approaches to marketing to consider and much more.

In case you do not have any business yet, but are considering launching a startup, review scraping can alert you of the problems consumers face in a specific market or segment. You can then offer a fresh, innovative solution to their pain points and become a pioneer in the market.

With the understanding of your consumers’ choices and preferences, you can meet their needs better, offer them more effective service, and provide products of superior quality.

Web crawlers can help you detect frauds in the market, or at least detect signs of such a problem. If you make the effort to capture disappointed customers, you’ll be able to delight them and gain their loyalty. In case you manage to find dissatisfied partners, you can establish a kind of mutually beneficial cooperation that will help your business grow.

All you need is to explore the web with a web scraping tool best matching your specifics and look for the cutting-edge solution that best fits your business.

Every web page, site or platform contains a great deal of useful information for business people. However, most popular review scraping resources have their specific strengths. While Amazon and eBay work best for product reviews, TripAdvisor and Booking are better to check for travel and tourist attraction reviews. Yelp has changed the business landscape thanks to its open reviews of businesses and services. A bit more details about each of the sites:

DataOx offers two approaches to web data scraping and review scraping in particular: data delivery and custom scraping tools development. In the first case we scrape and review data, cleanse it, and provide it to you for further analysis. We can also build a custom web application with advanced features for your business. It will be able to scrape your preferred data automatically. Take a look at our project example below.

We did a project for a client in which we developed a review aggregator that collects all reviews from such platforms as Glassdoor, Yelp, Trustpilot, Google My Business, and more. We scraped each review web source on a regular basis (approximately twice a day), performed manual checking, and automatically sent the data in a structured format directly to our client’s database. This project had a lot of challenges, as almost every review platform has its own anti-scraping solution on its website. To resolve this, we found workarounds for each platform to scrape the publicly available reviews and deliver the necessary data.

Our scraping experts can help you to develop a custom solution or build a data feed for web review scraping. Just schedule a free consultation.