Yelp! is extortion...

[techlabco]

I found Yelp! last year and started getting alot of calls and clients via Yelp!. For those of you who are not familiar, Yelp is a local area business review website that does a great job at getting users involved in Reviewing by a comfy community feel. And when your business is getting reviews and they are good--people start calling. My company was getting up to 3-5 calls per DAY when our reviews were building. It was really nice!

In September, when we have somewhere in the range of 15 5-star reviews...business was good--the extortion started. A saleslady calls me and starts talking about how well my company is doing on Yelp. She asked me if I would be interested in Paid Advertising on Yelp. Benefits? We would be able to have ad's on competitor's pages, move reviews around so we could have our "best" reviews at the top of our company page as opposed to our best reviews on the second page. I told her thanks but we are not interested as we don't feel that we need to advertise on the site because the reviews were enough for clients to come to us.

Our reviews DISAPPEARED 3 days later. All reviews. Maybe they were performing service on their server that housed our data? After 2 more days, the reviews hadn't come back, I called the saleslady--the only number I had for yelp as they don't have any contact info--and she told me that our reviews were removed because their special algorithm said that our reviews were either fake or we put them up. BS. She then went on to tell me that if one of benefits of being a paid advertiser is that we have control over these removals as well the ability to remove bad reviews. I have refused for months.

Since then, a 4-star review was posted on our Website Design service--which in itself--the girl loved us but she doesn't believe in giving anyone 5-stars no matter what. lol. Everyone is different! Our other 5-Star reviews keep getting removed but the 4-star has stuck like glue.
Clients from Yelp have dropped to 1 per 14 days. I am NOT happy with Yelp. Everyday, they called me asking me to advertise and I could resolve all this.

Finally, I gave in and said FINE. Some of my guys were like " are you sure??". I dropped $600 bucks per months a few days ago only to find out that 30 hours after I paid to take advantage of the "tools" they were gonna allow me to have--they changed all their policies due to 2 class-action lawsuits against Yelp due to this very nature of Extortion scheme. I am in the process of getting our money back. Funny thing is, our reviews are sticking again and business is picking up. But I just can't do this anymore. I have since filed my company as a plantiff in the class action suit. We have lost alot of money because of this extortion scheme. Sad...they are such as great avenue for reviews and business.....

Anyone else think this is shady and extortion? Anyone else have this problem with Yelp?

If you are interested in this Class Action lawsuit, please message me as I will send you the info you need to get involved. Please only ask me for this if you have a legit experience.

 

[Appleby]

I don't know much about Yelp but I know it's not very popular here in my small town. However, I heard a very similar type story about them on Leo Laporte's TWIT potcast the other day. They exact issue was mentioned where businesses are prompted to purchase services and if they don't reviews disappear and such. Sounds like a very fishy business strategy if you ask me.

 

[rsavoia]

The idea of paid accounts being able to remove poor reviews is questionable. A web site that allows this type of manipulation of customer feedback is not a site I would rely on when making decisions as to whether or not to do business with a particular company listed on the site.

As a consumer I rely on reviews from other consumers to help me decide whether a product or service is worth the money. If a company removes all of its reviews less than five stars it defeats the entire purpose of the review system. Not only can I not get a fair picture of the product or service but I can actually be deceived into thinking all is perfect when it may, in fact, be a poor choice.

Dell is a company that is known for doing that sort of thing in its forums. In fact, Dell representatives once removed a number of unflattering posts in the forums of a certain web based IT services platform and took a lot of heat from the techs whose posts they removed for doing so. It did serious damage to their reputation among the techs on the platform and many of those techs refused to work for them after that.

There are, of course, exceptions to the rule. Retaliatory or false reviews are not fair either and should be at least be edited to disclaim as much or removed as necessary. However, it really should be done at the discretion of a neutral party if possible.

Testimonials are one thing. However a company that manipulates reviews to deceive customers or potential customers is unethical and is not a company I would trust.