Why Every Amazon Seller Must Scrape Their Competitor’s Reviews

If you’re an Amazon seller, you spend hours trying to make your product stand out—tweaking descriptions, adjusting pricing, and running ads. But what if there were a smarter way to gain a competitive edge?

The answer? Your competitors’ reviews.

Think about it—your potential customers are already telling you exactly what they love and hate about products in your niche. The problem is going through thousands of reviews manually is impossible. That’s where Amazon review scraping comes in.

In this post, we’ll discuss how analyzing your competitors’ reviews can boost your sales, how to do it legally, and how Datahut can help you automate the process.

Before moving into the technical aspects of scraping, it’s essential to understand why Amazon reviews are so important. According to a recent study by PowerReviews, 99.9% of consumers read reviews when shopping online, and 96% of consumers specifically look for negative reviews. These statistics highlight the importance of reviews in influencing purchasing decisions. Positive reviews can boost sales, while negative reviews can provide valuable feedback for product improvement.

For Amazon sellers, reviews are not just a reflection of customer satisfaction—they are a direct line to understanding what customers love or hate about a product. By scraping competitor reviews, you can gain insights into what customers say about similar products, identify gaps in the market, and refine your offerings to meet customer needs better.

Scraping competitor reviews isn’t a one-size-fits-all strategy. Different industries can benefit from this practice in unique ways.

Customers often leave detailed reviews about specific product features in the consumer electronics industry. By scraping these reviews, you can identify which features are most appreciated and which ones are causing frustration. 

For example, if customers consistently complain about the battery life of a competitor’s smartwatch, you can highlight your product’s superior battery performance in your marketing campaigns. Scraping reviews can also reveal insights into how customers interact with software interfaces, connectivity features, or durability aspects. If customers frequently mention difficulties setting up a competitor’s smart home device, you can simplify your product’s setup process and emphasize this in your product descriptions. Additionally, scraping reviews can help you identify recurring issues like overheating, slow performance, or compatibility problems, allowing you to address these concerns in your product design and marketing. This ensures your product meets and exceeds customer expectations in a highly competitive market.

In the fashion industry, trends change rapidly, and customer preferences can be fickle. Scraping reviews can help you identify emerging trends and understand what customers want regarding style, fit, and fabric. 

For instance, if customers are raving about a particular type of fabric in a competitor’s product, you can consider incorporating similar materials into your designs. Reviews can also provide insights into sizing issues, such as whether a product runs large or small and how customers feel about the fit of certain styles. If customers frequently mention that a competitor’s jeans are too tight around the waist, you can adjust your sizing charts or design to offer a more comfortable fit. Additionally, scraping reviews can reveal color preferences, styling tips, or packaging feedback.

 For example, if customers appreciate eco-friendly packaging in a competitor’s product, you can adopt similar practices to appeal to environmentally conscious buyers. By leveraging these insights, you can tailor your product lines to meet customer expectations better and stay ahead of fashion trends.

For fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), customer preferences vary widely based on taste, packaging, and price. Scraping reviews can help you understand what customers value most in these products. 

For example, if customers frequently mention that they prefer eco-friendly packaging, you can make sustainability a key selling point for your products. Reviews can also highlight specific flavors, textures, or ingredients that customers love or dislike, allowing you to refine your product formulations. If customers consistently praise a competitor’s coffee for its rich flavor but complain about its high price, you can offer a similarly high-quality product at a more competitive price. Additionally, scraping reviews can reveal insights into packaging convenience, such as resealable bags or portion-controlled servings, influencing purchasing decisions. If customers frequently mention that a competitor’s snack packaging is difficult to open, you can design your packaging to be more user-friendly. By analyzing competitor reviews, you can also identify pricing sensitivities or promotional strategies that resonate with customers, helping you optimize your pricing and marketing efforts to better compete in the FMCG space.

Scraping competitor reviews isn’t just about gathering data—it’s about staying ahead of the competition. Here’s how you can use review insights to your advantage:

If customers repeatedly complain about something—like poor battery life, flimsy materials, or bad customer service—you can do better. Highlight those improvements in your product descriptions and marketing to attract frustrated customers looking for a better option.

Sometimes, what you think customers want and what they want are two different things. By analyzing reviews, you can see recurring requests—like better packaging, more size options, or improved durability—and use that information to upgrade your products before your competitors do.

Amazon is flooded with similar products, so positioning matters. If reviews show that people love a certain feature in a competitor’s product, highlight that feature in your marketing. Conversely, if they hate something, turn that into your unique selling point.

Example: If reviews show customers complaining about confusing assembly instructions for a competitor’s standing desk, you can advertise yours as “Easy Assembly—No Tools Required” and include a short demo video.

Review scraping helps you see patterns before they explode. If increasing customers mention a specific material, design, or feature, that’s a sign the market is shifting. You can use this information to adjust your inventory and be one of the first sellers offering exactly what people want.

Example: If reviews for running shoes mention a preference for lightweight, breathable materials, you can prepare your next stock accordingly, giving you a head start on the trend.

Understanding competitor reviews doesn’t just help you win new customers—it helps you keep them. If you proactively address common pain points (like slow shipping or poor durability), customers will be less likely to leave negative reviews on your products. Happy customers lead to higher ratings, better rankings, and more repeat buyers.

A pet products company specializing in pet carriers faced challenges on Amazon in 2018. Despite offering a high-quality product, their carrier was ranked below 10,000 in the “Pet Supplies” category, with a modest 3.8-star rating. Sales were stagnant, advertising efforts were ineffective, and product descriptions failed to resonate with customers. The company needed a strategy to improve visibility, customer satisfaction, and sales.

The company struggled to understand why competitors were outperforming them. Their product was durable and well-made, but customers weren’t connecting with it. They needed to identify what customers truly valued in pet carriers and adjust their product and marketing strategies accordingly.

The company decided to analyze over 25,000 reviews from its top five competitors. This analysis revealed three key customer priorities:

1. Airline Approval: Customers valued carriers that were certified for airline travel, as it made traveling with pets easier.

2. Air Circulation: Poor ventilation was a common complaint in negative reviews, indicating a significant pain point.

3. Dual Access: Many customers preferred carriers that could be opened from both the top and side, a feature rarely highlighted by competitors.

Based on these insights, the company made several strategic changes:

• They obtained airline certification for their carriers and prominently featured this in their product descriptions.

• They redesigned the ventilation system to address air circulation issues.

• They added a top door to their carriers for easier access.

• They rewrote their product descriptions to focus on the features customers cared about most.

The changes had a dramatic impact. Within three months, the company’s pet carrier jumped into the top 1,000 products in the “Pet Supplies” category. Their average rating improved from 3.8 to 4.6 stars, and sales more than tripled. Returns dropped significantly, and their advertising campaigns became more effective as they aligned with customer priorities.

Customer reviews reflected the improvements. One customer wrote, “Finally, an airline-approved carrier without any hassle! The ventilation is amazing compared to other carriers I’ve tried.” This feedback validated the company’s efforts and reinforced its commitment to meeting customer needs.

The company didn’t stop at its initial success. They continued to monitor customer feedback and market trends. When eco-friendly materials gained traction, they incorporated recycled materials into their carriers, further solidifying their position as a forward-thinking brand.

This case study highlights leveraging customer reviews to drive business decisions. Key lessons include:

• Customer-Centric Approach: Understanding and addressing customer pain points can significantly improve product design and marketing.

• Competitor Analysis: Analyzing competitor reviews can reveal unmet customer needs and opportunities for differentiation.

• Adaptability: Success on Amazon requires continuous monitoring of customer feedback and market trends and the willingness to adapt quickly.

The pet products company transformed its Amazon business by analyzing competitor reviews and focusing on customer priorities. Their story demonstrates the power of data-driven decision-making and the importance of listening to customers. For Amazon sellers, this case study is a valuable example of how competitor review analysis can lead to improved product offerings, increased sales, and long-term success.

Scraped reviews don’t just tell you what customers say; they also reveal how they feel. Sentiment analysis helps you measure whether customer feedback is positive, negative, or neutral—giving you a clear picture of how your brand (or your competitors) is perceived.

Sentiment analysis uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to determine the emotional tone behind words. By analyzing patterns in language, we can categorize reviews into positive, neutral, or negative sentiments.

• Positive review: “This smartwatch has an amazing battery life and a sleek design!”

• Neutral review: “The smartwatch is okay, but nothing special.”

• Negative review: “Battery drains too fast, and the strap is uncomfortable.”

If you want to perform sentiment analysis on scraped Amazon reviews, here are some tools to help:

• VADER (Valence Aware Dictionary and sentiment Reasoner): Great for analyzing short texts like social media posts and reviews. It assigns sentiment scores to words and phrases, making it ideal for Amazon reviews.

• TextBlob: A beginner-friendly Python library that simplifies sentiment analysis. It provides a polarity score that tells whether a review is positive, negative, or neutral.

• NLTK (Natural Language Toolkit): A comprehensive NLP library that allows deeper text processing, including tokenization, sentiment analysis, and more.

Track Customer Satisfaction Trends: By analyzing reviews over time, you can spot patterns in customer sentiment. If sentiment suddenly shifts from positive to negative, it might indicate a drop in quality, a new competitor gaining traction, or an external issue like shipping delays. Keeping an eye on these trends helps you react swiftly and maintain customer trust. 

Identify Negative Patterns in Competitor Products: Sentiment analysis allows you to pinpoint consistent issues in competitor reviews. If multiple customers mention the same complaint—such as poor durability or a misleading product description—you can use that knowledge to improve your product and highlight those enhancements in your marketing. 

Improve Product Development: If many customers complain about a feature, you can refine your next product version accordingly. For instance, if customers frequently mention that a laptop bag is too small for larger laptops, you can introduce a version with more spacious compartments. 

Enhance Customer Support: Sentiment analysis can help your customer service team identify and address recurring issues before they escalate. If a specific issue is repeatedly mentioned in reviews, proactively offering solutions—like better instructions or an extended warranty—can reduce negative feedback and improve customer satisfaction. 

Optimize Marketing Strategies: Understanding customers’ feelings about a competitor’s product can shape your marketing messages. If buyers consistently praise a competitor’s customer service but criticize product durability, you can position your brand as offering superior quality and excellent service to attract dissatisfied customers.

While scraping Amazon reviews can provide valuable insights, it’s important to do so in a way that complies with Amazon’s Terms of Service (TOS). Amazon prohibits the use of automated tools to scrape data from its site, so it’s crucial to ensure that your scraping practices are ethical and legal.

To build trust with your readers, it’s important to emphasize the importance of ethical scraping. This includes:

Amazon prohibits unauthorized data scraping using automated bots. To stay compliant, scrape only publicly available review data and avoid bypassing Amazon’s security measures.

Amazon’s robots.txt file provides guidelines on which parts of the site can be crawled. Following these rules helps ensure that your scraping activities remain ethical and within accepted limits.

Sending too many requests to Amazon’s servers in a short period can trigger rate limits or even get your IP blocked. To prevent this, limit the frequency of scraping requests and use delays between them.

To avoid overloading Amazon’s servers, consider using rotating proxies and ethical scraping practices that minimize disruption to the website.

If your business relies on Amazon data, consider using Amazon’s Product Advertising API instead of scraping. This ensures compliance while still providing valuable product data.

By following these best practices, you can extract valuable competitor insights while maintaining a trustworthy and compliant approach.

Scraped reviews are only valuable if they lead to actionable business improvements. Here’s how Amazon sellers can integrate these insights into their strategies:

By analyzing reviews, you can identify common complaints or desired features. If a competitor’s customers frequently complain about a fragile product, you can focus on durability in your design. Likewise, if people praise a certain feature, you might consider incorporating it into your next version.

Understanding customer sentiment helps craft more effective marketing messages. If people rave about how lightweight a competitor’s product is, you can emphasize your product’s portability. If buyers complain about confusing instructions, you can promote your “Easy-to-Use” feature.

Instead of waiting for negative reviews, you can address common concerns before they arise. If customers often struggle with assembly, including a step-by-step guide or a how-to video can improve satisfaction and reduce complaints.

Tracking review trends can also help you predict future demand. If interest in a particular product feature is rising, you can stock up before competitors catch on.

Scraping Amazon reviews can be done using various tools, depending on your needs and technical expertise. Here are some of the most popular options:

✔ Scrapy: A powerful Python framework for large-scale web scraping. It’s great for extracting large amounts of data but requires some programming knowledge. 

✔ Beautiful Soup: A simple Python library for parsing HTML and XML. It’s easier to use than Scrapy but is better suited for smaller projects. 

✔ Playwright: A modern browser automation tool that can handle JavaScript-heavy pages, making it ideal for scraping dynamic content from Amazon. 

✔ Selenium: A browser automation framework that can interact with web pages, though it’s slower compared to Playwright for large-scale scraping.

Each tool has its own strengths and limitations. While Scrapy and Beautiful Soup are great for static web pages, Playwright and Selenium are better for scraping JavaScript-heavy sites.

Manually setting up and maintaining a scraping system is complex, time-consuming, and comes with the risk of violating Amazon’s policies. That’s where Datahut comes in.

Unlike Scrapy or Beautiful Soup, Datahut provides a fully managed service—no need to write or maintain scraping scripts. We ensure that data is collected responsibly, respecting Amazon’s policies and guidelines.Whether you need occasional insights or real-time monitoring of thousands of products, Datahut’s services scale with your needs. Instead of just raw data, we provide clean, structured insights that help you improve your product, marketing, and customer service strategies. Focus on growing your Amazon business while we handle the heavy lifting of data extraction and analysis.

Scraping reviews manually takes forever. But Datahut can automate the process, delivering real-time competitor insights without the hassle.

Want to see how it works? Contact us for a free consultation and start outsmarting your competition today!

1. What are the limitations of scraping Amazon reviews?

Scraping Amazon reviews can be challenging due to Amazon’s anti-scraping measures, such as CAPTCHAs and IP bans. Additionally, Amazon’s TOS prohibits using automated tools for scraping, so it’s important to proceed cautiously.

2. How often should reviews be scraped for actionable insights?

The frequency of scraping depends on your business needs. For fast-moving industries like fashion or electronics, scraping reviews weekly or monthly may be necessary to stay up-to-date with customer feedback. For slower-moving industries, scraping reviews quarterly may be sufficient.

3. Can I use scraped reviews for marketing purposes?

While you can use insights from scraped reviews to inform your marketing strategies, avoiding directly copying or republishing competitor reviews is important, as this could lead to legal issues.