What can you learn from your competitors' negative reviews?
Miguel Nicolás
20/10/2026
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The complaints customers leave in other stores tell you about what they do not want, what they dislike and what disappoints them. Moreover, they do it for free.
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Let's start with an example in which a customer receives a backpack, uses it for a couple of months and the zip breaks. That same day they visit Amazon website, give it two stars and write: “Really nice, but the zip didn't even last a school term”.Okay, the customer was not yours and neither was the problem, but… if you sell backpacks, they have just told you something very useful about your niche: what they expected from the product and at what point they regretted the purchase.Your competitors' negative reviews are exactly that, free clues about what your market expects and isn't getting. In this post we tell you where to find them, how to collect them without too much hassle and, above all, what to change in your online store based on what you discover from the analysis.What is more, we do it Oleoshop style: with plenty of examples, which make it easier to understand.Ready?
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Why do other people's bad reviews tell you more than your own?
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Almost everyone reads reviews before buying. According to BrightLocal's annual survey for 2026, which interviewed 1,002 adults in the United States, 97 % read reviews of local businesses at least occasionally, and as many as 41 % always do. If your customers read that much, you need to read even more.The reviews of your own store have an obvious limitation: the size of your business. If you are a small eCommerce business, you will have a few dozen per product, and many will have come in because you have asked the customer to rate their purchase. It is good practice, but it tips the balance towards favourable opinions.Now think about the product pages of a large competitor, one of the biggest sellers. There are hundreds or thousands of reviews of products identical or almost identical to yours, and the bad ones tend to be very honest. They reveal problems you have not yet had the volume to detect. For example, comments like:
- “After three months the sole came off” (trainers). A defect that only appears with use.
- “I ordered my usual size and it's really tight” (clothing). A cut that runs small.
- “The instructions are only in English and nobody can make sense of them” (furniture). An assembly problem that ends in a return.
- “It smells wonderful, but the dispenser gets stuck all the time” (cosmetics). The product delivers, but the packaging ruins the whole experience.
If you sell something similar, any of those complaints could end up reaching your store sooner or later.Better to make use of a competitor's negative experience. -
Where can you find the reviews that interest you?
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There is not just one place. The same BrightLocal survey estimates that the average consumer checks up to 6 platforms for reviews before choosing a business. Do not worry, you do not need that many, but do not stick to a single source either, because each one tells you different things.
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1 - Amazon and other marketplaces
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The marketplaces are the best starting point for almost any physical product. Amazon has volume, lets you filter by star rating, by verified purchase… and often, even the very same item you sell, appears there under another brand (or otherwise something very similar). Here you will focus mainly on complaints about the product itself: materials, dimensions, durability. Something like “it says it's for 15.6-inch laptops and mine doesn't fit”.
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2 - Google Maps
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If your competitors have physical stores, their Google Maps listings collect complaints that do not appear on Amazon: the shop assistant's service, collection times, problems with returns... things along the lines of: “I went to exchange a size and they told me they only accepted online returns”.
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3 - Trustpilot and review platforms
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Trustpilot and other verified review platforms are great for studying specific online stores. Here people talk less about the product and more about the shopping experience: deliveries that never arrive, customer service that does not reply, refunds that take weeks. “Three emails and no reply. The refund arrived after 40 days.” These are business issues you should also keep an eye on.
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4 - YouTube, Reddit and forums
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Finally, there is the conversation that is not presented as a review. The comments on YouTube videos featuring unboxing or reviews, the threads on Reddit and your industry's forums tell you things nobody would put in a five-line rating, and other users also reply and add nuance.Under a coffee machine video you might find something like this: “I had the limescale problem too. Now I descale it every two weeks because the manual doesn't say anything”.These kinds of opinions take more effort to process, so leave them for a second phase.
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How do you analyse your competitors' reviews step by step?
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The first time will take you a little longer, but only until you have fine-tuned the process, you will see how much faster the next rounds go.To keep this from being purely theoretical, we will follow an imaginary store throughout the process: a small online backpack store selling urban and travel backpacks. Why backpacks? Because they give me scope to cover all the scenarios I want to consider.
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#1 - Narrow your scope before you start
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Choose between 3 and 5 competitors and, from each one, the 2 or 3 products most similar to your bestsellers. Do not go overboard: 40 or 50 carefully read reviews per product give you more than enough material. If you try to cover the whole catalogue, you will end up with thousands of rows you will never review (and possibly anxiety).
In our example, the backpack store chooses 3 competitors: two brands selling on Amazon and an online store with plenty of activity on Trustpilot. From each one it takes their bestselling laptop backpack and their cabin backpack. That is, 6 products in total. -
#2 - Filter by stars
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On Amazon, open the product reviews, go to the full list (you will be asked to sign in) and filter by rating. Go straight to the 2 and 3-star reviews. The 1-star ones tend to discuss lost deliveries or one-off frustrations, and the 5-star ones rarely explain anything. The ones in between tell you what the buyer expected and what was missing.Notice the difference:
- 1 star: “Horrible, don't buy it”.
- 3 stars: “The laptop fits well, but the straps dig into your shoulders when you carry it loaded for more than half an hour”.
You cannot do anything with the first one. With the second, you already know what to check in your product and what to say on your product page. -
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#3 - Transfer the reviews to a spreadsheet
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It sounds technical, but it is not, promise. You have three options depending on volume:
- Copy and paste manually. That is enough for a couple of products and to try the method for the first time. But with greater volume it can take forever.
- Use a free Chrome extension such as Instant Data Scraper or Data Miner. They detect the list of reviews on the page and download it as CSV or Excel with one click. You will get the hang of it in ten minutes. Here is a video explaining how to use Instant Data Scrapper in less than a minute and a half.
- Use extraction services (scraping) such as Apify, which has ready-made extractors for Amazon, Trustpilot and Google Maps, or Outscraper, which focuses on Google reviews. Both have free or trial plans that let you extract a few hundred reviews without paying. They require a little more setup process, but it bring everything together for you.
In our example, the store uses Instant Data Scraper on Amazon product pages and Apify for Trustpilot. It ends up with around 150 reviews of 2 and 3 stars (some products had no more). -
#4 - Prepare the analysis template
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Create a table in Google Sheets or Excel with one row per review and these columns: competitor, product, stars, complaint topic, verbatim quote and “does it affect me?”.This is what the first rows for our backpack store would look like:CompetitorProductStarsTopicVerbatim quoteDoes it affect me?ALaptop backpack2Quality“The zip broke after 4 months”YesACabin backpack3Dimensions“With the pockets full it doesn't fit in the airport baggage sizer”CheckBLaptop backpack3Comfort“The straps dig in when it's heavy”No, mine are paddedCCabin backpack2Customer service“I requested a different colour and they took 3 weeks”No
For the topic column, use a short, fixed list: quality, size or dimensions, comfort, shipping, packaging, instructions, customer service, price… If every review has a different label, you won't be able to group anything afterwards. -
#5 - Let AI do the initial classification
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If you have more than 100 reviews, paste the CSV into ChatGPT or Claude with a specific instruction. For example, this prompt:“Group these reviews by complaint type using these categories: [your list]. For each category, tell me how many reviews there are and copy two representative verbatim sentences. Flag separately any complaints that don't fit any category.”For the backpacks, the answer would look something like this: quality, 52 reviews (“the zip broke”, “the handle came unstitched”); dimensions, 31 reviews (“it doesn't fit as hand luggage”); and, under “uncategorised”, 6 reviews talking about the plastic smell when taking it out of the box. That last group is precisely, the kind of thing you would not have deliberately looked for.That said, check the result manually before trusting it, you know what AI is like. LLMs sometimes mix categories or round off counts. And only you can fill in the “does it affect me?” column, because only you know your product.
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#6 - Count and sort
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The most practical option is a pivot table (pivot table) that groups by topic and competitor. In a few minutes you will see which complaints recur across all stores (product or industry problems) and which are concentrated on a specific competitor (their weaknesses and, therefore, your opportunity).In our example, the pivot table makes two things very clear. More than a third of the complaints, spread across the three competitors, concern zips that break within a year: it's an industry problem. And almost all the customer service complaints concern competitor C: there is an opening to stand out.
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#7 - Save the phrases exactly as they are
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Copy into a separate tab the verbatim expressions that recur most often: “the zip broke”, “it doesn't fit in the cabin”, “the straps dig in”. This is your customer's actual vocabulary, and you will use it as soon as you start making changes.Before you start, bear two limits in mind. This analysis is for internal use: never publish reviews copied from another store on your website. Since reviews contain people's names, which are personal data, delete that column as soon as you download the file. Also check each platform's terms of use before using automated extraction tools.Repeating the process every 3 or 6 months will be more than enough to spot trends.
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What do you change in your store based on what you've discovered?
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Actually, this is the part that interests you most, but we needed to cover the how before moving on to the what.By now you have your data organised, so it is time to turn it into specific changes. Here is an example for each type of change, from different sectors, so you can see that the method works for almost any store.
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On your product pages
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The first thing I would do is apply what I have learned to the product pages. Answering a question before it arises prevents returns and shows that you know the product better than anyone.
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EXAMPLE (fashion): if “I ordered my size and it's too small” keeps appearing in your competitors' reviews, add a size chart in centimetres and a clear line: “Slightly snug fit: if you're between two sizes, order the larger one”.
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In your frequently asked questions
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Every complaint like “nobody explained how to assemble it” is a question you can answer in your frequently asked questions (FAQ). What is more, it is exactly the kind of content that helps with organic search rankings and that AI assistants cite when generating their answers.
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EXAMPLE (kitchenware): if “I didn't know it couldn't go in the dishwasher” appears in other stores' reviews, create the question “Can this frying pan be washed in the dishwasher?” and answer it in two lines, explaining why not.
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In your SEO and your ads
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The verbatim phrases you saved in step 7 are real searches. Include them in your keyword research and use them in titles, descriptions and headings. In SEM they are excellent material for Google Ads and Meta Ads campaigns: a message aligned with the user's actual intent gets more clicks (better CTR) and more conversions.
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EXAMPLE (cosmetics): if negative reviews of a moisturiser keep saying “it leaves my face shiny”, an ad with the headline “Matte-finish moisturiser for combination skin” speaks directly to someone who's already had that problem.
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In your sales pitch
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If service is what lets other stores down, there is your selling point. When several competitors accumulate complaints about slow shipping or complicated returns, highlight your actual delivery times and your exchange policy on the product page, in the basket and in your ads. It only works if you really do it better, of course.
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EXAMPLE (sport): if “I had to pay for shipping myself to return a pair of trainers” keeps appearing on Trustpilot and you offer free returns, make it clearly visible next to the buy button: “Free exchanges and returns for 30 days”.
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In your catalogue
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Reviews such as “I wish it came in a larger size”, “I miss having it in black” or “I'd like a children's version”, when repeated across several stores, point to demand that nobody is meeting.
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EXAMPLE (home decor): if “doesn't it come in 60 x 60?” keeps appearing in reviews of a competitor's cushions, you already know which size to try in your next order from the supplier.
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The full case: what the backpack store did
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Let's return to our store after discovering that more than a third of the complaints concern broken zips.It turns out its backpacks have zips from a recognised manufacturer, but it had never occurred to the store to mention it. With that in mind it made four changes:1.- It added the zip brand to the first paragraph of each product page.
2.- It uploaded a close-up photo of the zip.
3.- It extended the warranty on that component to two years.
4.- It created a frequently asked question: “What happens if the zip breaks?”.And since competitor C had accumulated customer service complaints, it began stating on the product page and in the basket that it replies to emails in less than 24 hours.None of those changes required any real effort, and they all address a concern the buyer already had before entering the store. That's how customer hesitations become your own selling points. -
Did you know how much you can learn from your competitors' bad reviews?
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Your next customers have probably already said what they want, they just said it in another store.Every two-star review you read about your competitors is a sale that someone lost over a specific detail, and a clue about what you can do better.You don't need to pay for market research from a consultancy or for an extremely expensive tool. With one afternoon, a free extension and a well-organised spreadsheet you will know what your buyers fear before pressing the pay button. From there, it is about taking away that fear in your own store.
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Have you seen how much you can learn from your competitors' negative reviews?