How Proxies Help You Use BigCommerce Reviews To Your Advantage

Reviews are some of the most valuable feedback you can receive. A customer who’s taken the time to write out their opinions is motivated by a particularly good or bad experience. Collecting reviews is a great way to study your own product and those of your competitors.

Where better to study reviews than platforms like BigCommerce? The eCommerce giant supports hundreds of thousands of businesses. Accessing BigCommerce reviews can help you research your field deeper than you’ve ever dreamed. The question is simple: how can you do that safely?

The answer is with a BigCommerce scraper and BigCommerce proxies. Scrapers are a simple way to collect all the information you want without manually visiting every web page. Meanwhile, proxies help keep your info safe in the process. Keep reading to learn why BigCommerce scrapers are so helpful, how you can use reviews to improve your business, and how to use proxies to do your research.

Mining BigCommerce Reviews: How it Works

BigCommerce is one of the staples of eCommerce, allowing its customers to do everything from build websites to make sales to monitor shipping. The platform neatly handles everything a business owner could need to sell things online. It also hosts customer reviews, which are a goldmine of helpful information.

A BigCommerce scraper can help you collect all that juicy information from different sites and put it in a single, helpful database. But how? By using the magic of automated bots.

Scrapers collect important data

A web scraper is a bot, or an automatic program, that interacts with the deep levels of websites for you. There are plenty of different types of bots, each of which completes its own tasks. Web scraper bots specifically sift through the fundamental HTML code of the website and collect designated types of data.

You can use a BigCommerce scraper to collect just about any kind of public information from a website. Reviews are a great type of information to gather since they’re easy for web scrapers to spot, and they’re full of valuable details for your business.

The internet is a big place, though. Before you start collecting information, it’s a good idea to protect yourself first. That’s where proxies can help. Using a proxy lets you learn things about other businesses without risking dubious sites stealing information from you in return.

Proxies protect your IP address

A proxy is basically a shield for your IP address. Your IP can be used to trace you and your company, and that knowledge can be used against you by the wrong website. If you wouldn’t wander the streets with your home address printed on the back of your shirt, you shouldn’t leave your IP address open either.

Your IP can also be used to prevent you from accessing certain websites. If you want to study stores in other countries, your IP may be blocked automatically. Using proxies can help you collect information from these stores without worrying about these restrictions.

Scraping BigCommerce store data

You can quickly, safely, and securely collect all the information you could want from BigCommerce stores by using proxies and web scrapers together. It’s simpler than you’d think! All you need is to work with trustworthy BigCommerce proxies and scraping software.

Once you’ve set up your scraping software with the type of information you want to collect, it will go to the URLs you chose and extract the information you want. After scraping BigCommerce exporting reviews is as simple as selecting your preferred file format.

From there, you can study the data on your own time without the hassle of having to go back to the websites and find the reviews manually.

Using Proxies to Collect Review Data

But how do proxies help? That comes down to how the internet works. Web scrapers are fast, which is excellent for you. However, they can sometimes be too fast.

Obviously, many online stores like those BigCommerce hosts are aware that hackers want to steal their customers’ private information. One way hackers do this is to use bots to access a website many times very quickly, hoping to catch sensitive information before it’s encrypted.

To avoid this, websites pay attention to how many visits they receive from a specific IP address. If a site notices one IP address visiting too many times in a short period, it might ban that IP address for protection.

That’s where proxies can help. BigCommerce stores are smart, but they’re not smart enough to tell the difference between a harmless scrape for reviews and a malicious attack. By setting up ethical proxies, you can shield your actual IP address while you collect the info.

If you have multiple proxies, you can just flip to a new one if your first gets banned and continue your data collection. You can use residential proxies, which are easy to maintain and less likely to be banned. You can also work with data center proxies, which are easier on the budget but can lead to more bans and take a little more work to maintain. Either way, you’ll be able to collect all the information you need.

How Reviews Can Benefit Your Business

But why should you collect reviews in the first place? It’s because reviews can help you make your business better. Since BigCommerce hosts so many stores, it’s absolutely packed full of the information you can use for yourself. It’s a quick and easy way to do market research, with the added benefit of having years of data to study.

For example, BigCommerce product reviews can help you learn what people do and don’t like about products like yours. When you collect enough BigCommerce customer reviews from stores like your own, you can look for trends. Which products receive great reviews? Which don’t? What features are mentioned most often in 5-star reviews?

You might be surprised at what you learn. People who buy a product might notice and appreciate different features than the business selling it. Minor features, like a no-itch tag on clothing or a particularly clear set of instructions on flat-pack furniture, can make all the difference.

Similarly, you can learn just as much from a BigCommerce complaints review as you can from positive reviews. Negative reviews can help you discover common failure points in products like yours.

If you learn that some products often break during shipping, you can pack your own more carefully. Suppose you discover that people complain about the size, shape, or utility in a certain way. In that case, you can improve your own product to avoid that problem.

Of course, reading one or two reviews, or even all the reviews for just one or two products, isn’t enough to get reliable information. You need a large sample size if you want to base your decisions off customer feedback. That’s why scraping BigCommerce reviews is the best way to learn.

Using Proxies to Collect Other BigCommerce Data

If you want to learn from product or seller reviews BigCommerce is the way to go. However, you can use scrapers and proxies to collect much more than just customer feedback.

Price changes

You can also scrape websites to study BigCommerce pricing changes, for example. The prices different stores charge for similar products can vary dramatically. Everything from sales to the time of year can affect how much a product is sold for. If you want to remain competitive, you need to keep track of market pricing trends in your field. Proxies can help you achieve that.

With a BigCommerce scraper and proxies, you can collect pricing data just as easily as reviews. Just set up your scraping software to gather prices and product titles instead of BigCommerce user reviews. You can quickly gather all the information you need to set your own prices.

You need to do this more than once if you want to stay up-to-date, of course. Prices change over time for many different reasons. BigCommerce pricing changes can be a sign that your competitors are trying to undercut you. They can also show that the other business believes that it can successfully charge more for the same product. Monitoring that gives you unmatched insight into those companies’ thought processes.

Potential new products

You can also learn about products you may want to start selling. For example, some manufacturers require retailers to follow minimum advertised price policies, or MAP policies. These are rules stating that a retailer can’t promote a product for less than the MAP. It keeps the perceived value of the product high.

You can use web scraping to learn about any MAP pricing BigCommerce stores seem to follow. If prices on the store never drop below a certain specific point, then you can be confident there’s a MAP agreement in place.

Final Thoughts on Scraping BigCommerce Stores

Scraping BigCommerce stores is an incredible way to learn from your competitors and even your own reviews. You can scrape your own site to collect all your reviews in one place, or you can study competitors’ sites to learn from their mistakes. Whatever reviews you choose to scrape, a high-quality proxy can help you make the process quick, easy, and safe. If you’re interested in elite, ethical proxies for your business, you can reach out today to learn more.

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