Analyzing customer reviews for e-commerce marketplace success

User-generated content, especially customer reviews are a goldmine of insights for any player in the e-commerce realm. They reveal how your customers think, the search terms they use,  their core buying intent, the features they seek, and much more. An Indian e-commerce giant eager to gain an edge over its rivals sought to capitalize on this valuable data stream to inform their positioning and strategic business decisions.

The marketplace firm knew it would need strong research and customer review analytics support to not only glean actionable insights but also ensure that the process was customizable and scalable. These learnings were meant to eventually help them improve on aspects like product content, positioning, inventory management, and have a constant pulse of evolving consumer trends across brands and product categories.

Business Challenge

Customer reviews are hands-down one of the most powerful purchase drivers. But going a step further to understand what’s in them offers profound insight into shopper behavior. They reveal customer reactions, the words they use to describe products, how they search, their sentiment, features they seek, among other customer signals that help businesses deliver outstanding shopping experiences.
An e-commerce giant that has over 150 million products listed on its marketplace across 80+ categories wanted to capitalize on this valuable data stream to gain an edge over its peers.

Approach and Solution

To help them achieve this, Netscribes employed its comprehensive review analytics solution. Through this platform the client was able to make sense of over 14 million customer reviews, across a million products, spanning over 16 thousand brands, within seven months.
To provide a granular view of how each product was performing, our team developed an interactive dashboard featuring:

• Drill-down filters that enabled users to aggregate or even slice and dice the analysis at various product category hierarchies. These also included date-wise boundaries to cull seasonal spikes and time-bound trends
• Topic spread offered a deeper understanding of the most critical or talked-about features and attributes in a particular product or category, helping capture buyer intent and priorities
• Sentiment spread provided a feature-led sentiment analysis of each review, bucketing them into positive, neutral, and negative. When mapped with topic spread this function offered a more holistic consumer-product perspective

• Trendlines revealed cyclical trends in mentions for every feature. They also helped understand if certain features have moved up the ranks versus others within a given period. They even detected improvements in customer perception of non-performing product features

• Brand comparisons helped create a brand-based yardstick for topic mentions, sentiment spread, and customer ratings

Results Delivered

Through this initiative the client was equipped with:

• An intuitive review analytics dashboard that helped mine granular-level insights that were measurable, accurate, and reliable.
• A highly-scalable and customized platform with visual data representations to power strategic and timely decisions
• Product reviews insights across multiple brands, product categories, and subcategories like apparel, footwear, mobiles, bags and wallets, headphones, wrist-watches, etc.