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I am an owner of recently open Thai restaurant. Below is solely my personal experience with Yelp that I would like to share.
1. Biggest mistake I made was talking to Yelp. Once they know I own the restaurant they keep on calling to get us to subscribe to $300 per month advertise with them. There is nothing wrong with that; however, there are no reason for us to advertise on a site where I don't think it portrays business fairly.
2. Filtered system is bogus. All of our legitimate positive review got filtered and they don't filtered bad review. We would be 4 star restaurant, but it keep us at 3.5 star (like that matter, but again I think it is not fair)
3. I used to use Yelp and review restaurant and service. More and more unfair practice I might stop them completely.
4. Sad but I have to say this Yelp's customers (more than 90%) are cheap and rude. We used opentable reservation and we can see the world different between yelp's customer and open table customer. Opentable's customer who actually dine at the restaurant can review the restaurant. On yelp, you can't even tell when they dine at the restaurant or what they said is directly from their experience not from competitor or someone who hate the restaurant.
As much as I like their idea of website, I hope Google place and their newly create restaurant review take over them. Yelp is not good for small business.
I agree 100% with this review. I am a small business owner, and Yelp has contacted me several times to sign up for their $300 per month advertising. Every time I tell them I don't need to advertise, another one of my 5 star reviews gets filtered. They have only kept the 1 star reviews, one of which was written by one of my competitors, and the other one written by a customer I refused to treat for free. They finally convinced me to agree to a Yelp deal, from which they get 30% of the sales. After they contacted me last week to sell me advertising again and I turned them down again, two of my 5 star reviews got filtered. I couldn't believe it. Both of these reviews were written by people who purchased the Yelp deal from them directly. Yelp is a total scam and god help any business owner who refuses to buy advertising from them.
I own a Flower Shop in Boston and 9 good reviews are filtered but the 2 bad ones remain. None of my good reviews are shown since I declined to advertise with them a year ago.
You are dead on about Yelp. Yelp has filtered all of my legitimate reviews so now I have one review - a negative one from a group-deal purchaser upset with me because SHE waited too late to redeem a voucher. The reviewer never ever received services from my business but she basically skewers it, claiming it is so horrible that everyone should "stay away"! I am suspicious of Yelp. Earlier this year I was solicited by one of their reps (a guy) to advertise my massage and bodywork business with them. I've never been impressed by Yelp so I easily turned the offer down. Less than a week later I found a suspicious, fake review of my business supposedly by a male client. The name was unfamiliar so I searched my customer database and could not find anyone by that name. The 'so called client' gave a positive review for a therapist who supposedly worked at my business. The reviewer insinuated he'd received a happy ending! I was pissed! I am the sole proprietor and the only full time employee at my business. I have an independent contractor and both of us offer legitimate therapeutic massage and would NEVER do anything like what the reviewer insinuated. I didn't leave a 6-figure job, pay tens of thousands of dollars, and take 100s of hours of CES to become a friggin prostitute! I take my work and my business seriously. Why would I risk my entire life for any amount of money let alone a few bucks! I immediately contacted Yelp but they refused to take the review off. (it eventually fell off due to the filtering algorithm, lol) They did, however, suggest I pay to advertise with them! Maybe if I had I wouldn't have gotten the fake review in the first place...hmmm?
What you say is 100% correct! Yelp's so called algorithm is just a means to get you to pay their sales people, that way as far as I can see the good reviews get re-instated and the company paying is given a way to remove bad ones. I must be one of the lucky ones as 1 bad review actually got filtered but not until we lost business because of people believing that Yelp was a honest review site!
To my thinking Yelp should be forced to reveal their business practices and algorithm to a federal judge so that the courts can decide what is fair and what's unfair!