The open web offers countless places for consumers to talk about products and brands, including eCommerce websites, business review sites, and social media. Companies need to pay close attention to what consumers say online, and automated review monitoring solutions enable them to do that. However, the challenge for these solutions lies in getting enough reviews data from numerous disparate sources and incorporating that data fast.
What is review monitoring?
Review monitoring is the process of tracking reviews posted online on various websites. Most companies today use automated or semi-automated tools to track online reviews, allowing them to respond to negative feedback from customers in a way that can strengthen brand loyalty. Businesses can also use reviews data for social listening, a tool to elevate conversations about their brand or products.
How companies get data for review monitoring
The open web contains a wealth of information about businesses, brands, products, and services. Much of that information lies in customer reviews scattered across the web:
- Business review sites — Popular business review sites include Yelp, Google, Better Business Bureau (BBB), and Foursquare.
- Specialized review sites — Some review sites focus on specific industries or verticals. For example, you can find car reviews on Edmunds and Kelley Blue Book (KBB), restaurant reviews on OpenTable and Gayot, and hotel/travel reviews on Expedia and Booking.
- Social media platforms — E.g., Facebook, Instagram, WeChat, and Reddit.
- eCommerce sites — Nearly every shopping site allows customers to leave reviews about the products they purchase. Popular eCommerce sites with product reviews include Amazon, eBay, Walmart, and Target.
- Customer outreach — Another way to get feedback on a business or product is through online or emailed customer surveys, dedicated feedback forms, or customer interviews.
The best way to obtain relevant online data from reviews depends on the source, and collection methods include:
- Ad-hoc web scraping — You create a list of websites you’d like scraped, and the data provider will store the scraped data in a database or structured file. Some vendors will deliver the data via an API. In general, ad-hoc web scraping solutions are designed for small-scale data projects.
- Traditional APIs — You use an API that returns data collected from various sources and stored in a database or text files (typically converted to JSON). Some APIs will provide access to in-memory databases for real-time data retrieval. APIs work well for use cases where you need high scalability and speed.
- Ad-hoc APIs — You use an API that returns continuous data feeds based on ad-hoc queries. For example, our eCommerce Reviews API provides structured reviews data in the form of a web data feed. Each feed is based on an ad-hoc, product-specific query created by the user. You can use queries to refine the data feeds returned by the API, allowing you to get the precise data you need for your use case.
- Manual collection — Some companies collect data from customer outreach methods manually, entering that data into spreadsheets or databases. You need to have adequate human resources for this type of data collection, which takes more time than automated methods.
Challenges in getting data for review monitoring solutions
The ways that companies get data — whether through web scraping, APIs, or manual collection — have their own set of challenges, which can include:
- Lack of comprehensiveness — Web scraped data sets usually provide a limited amount of data, so you don’t get enough reviews data to provide accurate insights about products or brands. Companies risk missing critical feedback that requires an immediate and thoughtful response.
- Poor quality — Generally, web-scraped data and public datasets (like Common Crawl) contain a lot of noise and unwanted content. Companies must address these things before they can properly analyze the data.
- Costly and time-consuming — If you use data with unwanted content and noise, you must invest in more human resources to clean and preprocess the data. Data cleaning, preprocessing, and manual data collection methods take a lot of time to complete.
- Not scalable — Data collection methods involving web scraping or manual processes are difficult and costly to scale because of the increasing number of people needed to do so. These methods also can’t keep up with the constant barrage of reviews posted online every day.
- Not multilingual — Most data sources come in one language, usually English. Customer reviews come in many languages, and sometimes their meaning or intent can get lost in translation.
You can avoid these problems using an API that returns product information, including reviews, in structured web data feeds.
Boost review monitoring with on-demand reviews data
Your users need a monitoring solution that provides a complete and timely picture of what customers think about their products and brands. To get that broader picture, you should incorporate product reviews into your platform, and you can do that quickly with the Webz.io eCommerce Reviews API.
The Webz.io eCommerce Reviews API gives you:
- Comprehensive data collection — The API provides product and reviews data in multiple languages from 950+ eCommerce sources, including marketplaces and consumer packaged goods (CPG). It supports eCommerce and marketplace data sources like Amazon, Target, Walmart, and Wayfair. You can get reviews data from travel and hospitality sites like Booking, Expedia, and TripAdvisor. The list of supported data sources and categories continues to grow so you never miss relevant reviews.
- High-quality data on demand — The eCommerce Reviews API provides structured product-specific reviews data, allowing users to get high-quality reviews data on an ad-hoc basis. You can search for products by URL, keyword, or category. You can give your customers the information and deep insights they need at any time and in near real-time. Plus, the data returned by the API is already cleaned, processed, and enriched, saving you a lot of preprocessing time.
- Cost-effective and scalable data solution — We’ve created a ready-made, scalable solution to get more high-quality reviews data — all you have to do is integrate our API with your review monitoring platform. We’ve already collected over one million structured product data and the one billion reviews that go with them. Plus, once you activate a product, we collect all historical reviews data and then continuously check the product for new updates, which includes product information and reviews.
Getting product information and reviews is easy with the Webz.io eCommerce Reviews API. You can learn how it works by reading this guide.
Get started with the eCommerce Reviews API today
The data you feed your monitoring solution directly impacts how it performs and the value your customers get from it. With the Webz.io eCommerce Reviews API, you can leverage high-quality, timely reviews data to boost the power of your monitoring platform. More relevant data means better results for your customers.
Ready to get started with the eCommerce Reviews API? Talk to one of our data experts.
