A Guide to Review Scraping in 2023

Consumer purchasing decisions are influenced by many factors. Ratings and customer reviews are the main factors affecting purchase decisions. Before making a purchase, 95% of consumers read product reviews.

On the other hand, it is difficult for businesses to collect a large number of customer reviews from various sites. Web scraping allows companies to monitor and collect customer reviews on social media and websites. 

In this article, we will explain what review scraping is, how companies can collect and track customer and product review data from various sites, and why collecting and monitoring customer reviews is very important for businesses.

What is Review Scraping?

Review scraping is the process of extracting customer review data from various web sources using tools or APIs, such as social media platforms and review pages, for example Amazon, eBay, G2, Capterra, etc.

How to Scrape Product/Customer Reviews from E-Commerce Sites

Suppose you manufacture consumer gaming accessories such as gaming headsets, mice, etc. You need to know the main competitors in this industry, what trends you need to stay ahead of, where you stand in this competitive landscape, and identify your strengths and weaknesses to create a roadmap that ensures a competitive advantage. 

Web scraping bots collect competitor reviews from e-commerce sites. You can also explore the 'Customer Questions & Answers' section to learn more about how your competitors differentiate their products, as well as the preferences and needs of your target market.

6 Steps to Scrape Product/Customer Reviews from E-Commerce Sites

To illustrate the steps, we will take gaming headsets as the target product.

1. When searching for gaming headsets, you will get many results. You can sort the results according to your preferences, but generally, products with high ratings (number of ratings and customer reviews) appear at the top of the list. 
2. Click the 'View all customer reviews' button to see all customer reviews for a specific brand. Scroll down the product page to get all customer reviews. 
3. All product information, including its name, brand, ratings, reviews, and price, was collected using a web bot.
4. To run the scraping bot, copy the URL of the reviews page and paste it into the program.
5. The scraper will run the URL and collect all the necessary product information, such as product reviews, reviewers, and ratings. 
6. After collecting reviews on the first page, the bot will automatically collect all subsequent pages. 

Challenge: To get a sufficient understanding of a product or service, you need to scrape dozens of product web pages. Most e-commerce sites are well protected and use anti-scraping techniques such as CAPTCHA. If you make multiple requests to the same site, it will consider your activity suspicious and restrict access.

Solution: Use a proxy server with residential or backconnect IPs. Residential proxies and backconnect proxies provide greater anonymity. Residential proxies provide users with IP addresses assigned by ISPs. As a result, it is difficult for websites to detect and track. Backconnect proxies are a great solution if your scraping project requires changing the IP address with each connection request.

How to Scrape Customer Reviews from Social Media Platforms

Social media channels are one of the platforms where customers can share their experiences about a product/service. Before purchasing a product or service, most users read customer reviews on review platforms.

Many modern consumers check brand websites, their social media accounts, and read reviews to get insights about the brand's products and services during the information search stage of the purchase decision process. Businesses need to monitor mentions of their brand and competitors on social media to improve their products and empower customers in their decision-making process.

Web scraping bots collect all mentions of your brand and competitors on social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. Collecting and monitoring customer review data allows companies: 

• Know who is talking about their products/services and where they are located. 
• Analyze the growth of their social media audience and how it compares to competitors.  
• Conduct thorough sentiment analysis to identify where there is a problem with their products and services.

6 Steps to Scrape Social Media Mentions and Customer Reviews from Social Media Platforms

Before starting data collection, define your goal. Perhaps you want to identify current issues related to your products/services, understand your brand's market positioning, or follow market trends. Continuing with the previous example of gaming headsets, your company wants to analyze competitors' products and services on social media.  

1. Identify who your competitors are
2. Choose a social media platform for data collection, such as Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
3. Select the information you want to collect. For example, you can find a specific gaming headset brand on Instagram, copy the profile URL and paste it into the data collection bot. The bot will provide you with all the necessary information, such as post images, URLs, likes, comments, followers, etc. If you only need customer reviews about products and services, select post comments as the output data type. You will get all comments from the target data source. 
4. Specify the input data: profile URL, post URL, specific hashtag or keyword. You can collect customer review data by specific URL, keywords, and #hashtags. 
5. When collecting customer reviews by keyword or hashtag, you can limit the number of comments and posts.
6. After the data collection process is complete, you can view the collected data in CSV or JSON format, including reviews, authors, likes, timestamps, etc.