Product and Reviews Data: The Secret Behind Powerful Online Retail Intelligence

Online retail is one of the most competitive markets, with every company looking for an advantage that will lead to great success. Well, that advantage is data — product and reviews data specifically. Online retail business intelligence solutions can use it to help retailers better understand consumer behavior, gain insights into product popularity, discover emerging market trends, and so much more. Product and reviews data is crucial to getting deeper insights from automated data solutions.

Analyze product data for strategic decisions

Product data includes many useful attributes, including category, brand, title, description, price, promotions, and reviews. Companies in the online eCommerce monitoring and intelligence industry can leverage these attributes to help online retail businesses make informed decisions regarding:

• Brand — Automated platforms can leverage product data for reviews monitoring, eCommerce monitoring, and consumer intelligence. Use product reviews data to help online retailers better understand market trends and consumer behavior. Enable brands to monitor and manage their reputations by addressing customer sentiment and overall satisfaction in near real-time. 
• Product Content – Audit, personalize, and optimize product data with product content such as descriptions, titles, and images to better meet customer demands, improve your competitive positioning, and increase revenue.
• Pricing and promotions — Product data is ideal for competitive intelligence and price monitoring platforms. Take advantage of real-time product data across the web, letting retailers keep track of product and category price changes at various eCommerce sites and marketplaces. Help them see current pricing trends and promotions across key retailers so they can optimize their offerings accordingly. 
• Share of search — Leverage product and reviews data to enhance search rankings, boosting the visibility and performance of brands in the online retail space. 
• Availability – Use product data to help online retail companies optimize their eCommerce assortments and recognize opportunities to drive value. Allow them to boost their digital shelf organic and paid search rankings by measuring their brand against top performers.

While product data holds a wealth of retail-related information, online retail business intelligence companies face many challenges when leveraging it.

Challenges of monitoring product and reviews data

The challenges automated platforms face regarding product and reviews data typically involve:

• Data aggregation — Product and review data are often scattered across web and mobile platforms, making it challenging for companies to aggregate and analyze the information comprehensively. Businesses have difficulties obtaining a holistic view of the market, leading to incomplete insights and potential misinterpretation of consumer sentiments.
• Data accuracy and quality — Platform providers constantly struggle with ensuring the accuracy and quality of product and reviews data because sources often vary in reliability and authenticity. Automated intelligence solutions need high-quality, accurate data or they risk providing inaccurate insights that misguide the decision-making processes of their users. Poor performance often results in damage to the credibility of the solutions provider.
• Real-time data access — Many eCommerce monitoring and intelligence platforms face delays in accessing product data, which often involve cleaning and processing the data and then storing it in a data warehouse. This time-consuming data collection process hinders the platform’s ability to provide up-to-the-minute insights, which means clients would have difficulties responding swiftly to market trends and shifts in consumer behavior.
• Sentiment analysis — Language is complex and nuanced making it difficult for automated platforms to accurately interpret sentiment from customer reviews. Plus, most data sources come in one language, usually English. Customer sentiment comes in many languages, and sometimes it can get lost in translation. Misinterpreting consumer attitudes can lead to flawed insights that influence business decisions in negative ways.
• Data integration — Integrating diverse data sources requires specialized technical skills. It often takes time to find the technical talent needed to integrate new data sources and to maintain data collection systems. Automated platform companies can incorporate new data sources faster by using third-party APIs, but they require engineers or developers to integrate them with existing platforms.
• Scaling data — As the volume of data increases, scalability becomes a concern. Companies that collect data through manual processes or web scraping spend more because of the increasing number of people and infrastructure needed to scale. Limited scalability leads to platforms performing poorly and higher operational costs. 
• Regulatory compliance — Automated intelligence companies must navigate various data privacy and compliance regulations when handling customer reviews and product data. Non-compliance can lead to legal repercussions, damaging the reputation and trustworthiness of the platform provider.

These challenges may seem daunting, but automated platform companies can overcome them with help from a specialized data partner.

How the Webz.io eCommerce Reviews API can help

The Webz.io eCommerce Reviews API provides on-demand access to structured product and reviews data from 950+ eCommerce and marketplace sources. Use the API’s flexible search options to find similar products, competitor products, product reviews, entire product categories, and more. Our API can help eCommerce monitoring and intelligence platforms in many ways:

• Data aggregation — Our API provides access to over 950 web sources, which include eCommerce sites, marketplaces, and consumer packaged goods. It helps automated platforms collect data from a wide selection of sources and categories, including travel and hospitality, jobs and employment, restaurant and grocery, electronics, and app stores.
• Data accuracy and quality — We use a proprietary crawling technology that continuously tracks changes to data sources. This technology ensures that the data our API provides remains accurate and high quality. The API also provides the data in the form of structured, machine-readable feeds.
• Near real-time data access — Our API allows users to consume data on an ad-hoc basis, meaning they can request to cover a new product or review at any time. Our API continuously updates the data so that users can get product information and deep insights in near real time.
• Sentiment analysis — The API provides reviews from many sources and in multiple languages, so you can train your models to understand sentiment in more than one language. With comprehensive multilingual reviews data, you can ensure you have all the data needed to craft accurate sentiment analysis.
• Integration — You can easily integrate product and reviews data with our API — just plug it into your application or platform and go.
• Scalability — We built our data solution to scale automatically, and we manage the service so platforms can quickly scale to meet their current product data needs. Our API has a rate limit of one request per second and can process large numbers of requests on any product or category. 
• Regulatory Compliance — We have implemented automated measures to ensure that our data meets privacy compliance requirements. Our crawling technology is continuously updated in accordance with website terms updates to ensure ethical scraping and adherence to regulations.

We built the Webz.io eCommerce Reviews API to help automated data, monitoring, and intelligence platforms get a better handle on these challenges.

Boost your platform with product and reviews data

With the Webz.io eCommerce Reviews API, you can boost the power of your automated platform with high-quality, timely product and reviews data. When you feed more relevant data to your platform it will provide better results for your customers. Don’t wait. Use our API to give your customers more value today.

Ready to get started with the eCommerce Reviews API? Talk to one of our data experts.