APIs help businesses become more effective and right away consume data that has already been put together, cleared of anomalies and that is delivered in a form which allows them to focus on their own core software application instead of reinventing the wheel and building something new from scratch.

While there are many APIs out there for any sort of data, consumer data holds a special place. I am not talking about consumer personal data – which is definitely still very much sought after despite any governing legislation nowadays – but data that covers real consumer experiences from their real interactions with consumer goods from the most renowned global brands or fresh new innovative startups.

That is consumer product reviews data that I am talking about.

 

Why an API for product reviews?

 

It’s not any kind of product reviews but aggregated product reviews across multiple marketplaces and online stores from any country and larger regional geographic areas.

With the variety of software applications built around consumer data, product reviews represent an increasingly valuable data stream that has been for a long time neglected but which is now becoming more and more needed as input for a series of analytics used across the entire supply chain of an organization.

Products are not going to sell well unless someone talks about their goods and their bads. There is a totally new world arising beyond any marketing campaign – the world of consumer product reviews where those who bought first return to the online stores and share their opinions on all aspects of a product. That’s valuable raw customer feedback which, in the long term, wins over any marketing and influencer campaign. Therefore, why leave the customer outside of your considerations while analyzing and planning for your business growth and customer satisfaction?

Here is where FeedCheck review monitoring and analytics API comes to contribute to what you need to offer to your customers as part of a larger solution that you might be building for them.

 

 

How FeedCheck “talks” product reviews to your application?

 

There are four areas that are essential for ensuring the right communication between our FeedCheck review monitoring platform and your application:

• functionality
• reliability
• performance 
• and security

We are discussing each of them below:

 

Functionality – or which product review data the API communicates and how

 

1. Fully automated product update

Nowadays, when everything gets more and more automated and almost no one still desires to perform tasks manually, the FeedCheck API offers a fully automated experience while providing you with the needed product reviews on your preferred schedule.

That means that whenever you need to remove certain products or add new ones to the FeedCheck API, as your business or your clients require, you can do that without engaging with manual actions but programming everything at your end so that the API delivers the data in consequence. Thus you eliminate any human error risks and just let the data flow in to support your business.

 

2. Product review core data aggregation

What is the most sought-after product review data by our customers who need to incorporate product reviews into their own analysis?

The product reviewer, star rating, review title, content and review publishing date on the eCommerce website – based on this aggregated data received at your end you can continue developing further data analysis or actions such as: 

• create your own specific review alerts
• display the latest new reviews on your screen
• add the reviews to your product management database and link them to your products and have all this data in one place
• use the product review data for your KPIs calculus and correlate review and rating metrics with your sales data while keeping it inside your company 

 

3. Other product review related data

In addition, the API communicates a series of details such as the quality of the review. This is shown by data (often known as ‘verified purchase’) that tells whether the reviewer had actually purchased the product which he/she reviewed or not.

 

4. Time filtering

Whenever the FeedCheck API is called, the data that you need to receive back should always consist of new reviews, newer than the very last read review. This allows you to build the entire review history in your application and keep adding on that on an on-going basis according to your own API call settings which can be set to run at a few hours, on a daily basis, once a week or any time on your demand.

The product review data API call is reaching your application in JSON format. Alternatively, CSV is also available.

 

Reliability

This is the most important feature of an API which tells you its availability to respond to your calls or how often the API function is down.

The FeedCheck API has a high-availability which consists of a 99.99% uptime which means 20 seconds/month downtime.

 

Performance

The FeedCheck API does not work as you might think of any other API.

Once you know which products you need to aggregate reviews for and you do the settings at your end accordingly, FeedCheck starts the aggregation process which from that moment is continuously ON. Therefore, at any time your own application can read your product reviews and related data with the FeedCheck API almost instantly.

The whole process is automated – there’s no physical user and manual work involved. But if you want and need so, your calls can also be initiated manually, case when the FeedCheck API will respond on-demand.

 

Security

Our API security mechanism is as secure as it needs to be without unnecessarily complicating things:

• the access is based on individual user and password credentials authentication
• we never expose any confidential information on URLs 
• and we use HTTPS  ensuring prevention against any middleman attacks.

 

If you came to the stage where you find your customers’ feedback data valuable for discovering and understanding how your products perform, according to their experiences and insights – often enriched with feedback about competitor products they have used, too – then a product review monitoring tool like FeedCheck could start aggregating your data even today. Unlike other tools that can only support standard marketplaces like Amazon, FeedCheck covers any marketplace and online store where your customers discuss about you.