Startup Idea: Automated Review Aggregator and Analyzer for Ecommerce

Startup idea to develop a software tool capable of identifying, gathering and analyzing product reviews from multiple ecommerce sites. By tracking specific product names or model numbers, the tool should be able to provide daily/weekly/monthly reports accompanied by an analytical dashboard. This solution would enable manufacturers to understand real-time customer insights about their products without incurring excessive costs.

WHAT INDUSTRY: I am in marketing for a mid-level manufacturing company in the USA (large enough that we deal directly with "big" national names such as the big box department and home improvement stores, but not so large that we are a Fortune 500 size corp.) ....

BIG PAIN POINT IN DAILY WORK: One of our biggest problems with the growth of ecommerce is that customer reviews are such a critical part of success in selling online. We recognize, as a manufacturer, the value of reviews on major sites, in that they are real-time insights into what customers like and do NOT like about our products. HOWEVER, there is not a viable way for us to gather all this review data in some quantifiable way to review and analyze.

Some of our retail partners offer for a premium fee to provide customer review data. But the price is prohibitive (many thousands of dollars) even for a mid-size company like ourselves.

We could of course hire and pay staff to to sites and copy and paste and review the "reviews," but this is tedious, subject to human error, and costly.

I am convinced that there must be a coding tool able to be developed that can "follow" some identifier (perbaps our product names, our model numbers, etc.), and "learn" how to "find" the pages with reviews on them, and gather that info and report back with real reviews. star ratings, etc.

Because this material is available freely online, I believe it would NOT be subject to any legal restrictions from the site owners.

WOULD WE PAY FOR THIS? YES, if the tool was proven, and was less costly than paying a premium fee to get this from our retail partners.

HOW WOULD THIS SOLVE OUR PROBLEM: To be able to receive a daily/weekly/monthly report that showed data from all the new reviews received about our products, as well as some sort of analytical "dashboard" would be a tremendous help in allowing us to react to issues or perceived issues customers see in our products. Reacting in "real time" would allow for a much shorter cycle to implement product fixes than currently exists. Yes, I tried finding this by searching for terms such as "product review gathering" etc.

We do NOT have a viable way to solve the problem now. We, as time allows, visit our retail partner "big box" websites to manually quickly scan reviews of our products for helpful info.