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Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut

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Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut

#81

Post by tyingq »

Kique wrote: post #71
ilikehurdles wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.yelp-support.com/article/Does-Yelp-extort-small-... I've kind of gotten tired of diving into the whole "yelp extorted my brother's cousin's friend's coworker's business for better ratings" anecdotal story schtick so I'm just going to link the above -- or are you suggesting they're getting away with lying on official communication? If yelp is altering reviews for paying clients, please show the evidence as…

The company I work for advertises pretty heavily on Yelp for our 150 locations, and the main perk isn't better ratings but having your bad reviews hidden behind a different sorting system. If you go on any Yelp business page today you will see that it isn't sorted by Date, it's sorted by "Yelp Sort". So if my business doesn't advertise on Yelp then maybe bad reviews will be on the first page of a Yelp Sorted ranking.…

Is the extortion scheme as simple as that? Paying businesses get "Yelp Sort", non-payers get "Default Sort"?

If so, that answers a lot of questions.

Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut

#82

Post by austhrow743 »

hyperbovine wrote: post #46
scarface74 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To quote Jobs about Dropbox - Yelp is a feature not a product.

Steve Jobs FTW yet again. I thought he was wrong about Dropbox for the longest time. But their latest attempts at "productizing" their service (Adobe / Zoom / Slack / Atlassian / Google Docs / Office integrations, "social" features, etc. etc.) have convinced me that simple file sync, which is all I ever wanted from them, is not enough to sustain a company. Meanwhile the shareholder-induced march downwards continues.

Box.com seems fine. Dropbox just aimed a little big.

Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut

#83

Post by stri8ed »

dhd415 wrote: post #25
stri8ed wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Yelp since its significantly harder to fake reviews on it than it is on Google. That, and the community culture is centered on high-quality reviews.

The quality of Yelp must be location-specific. Where I live, Yelp reviews are borderline worthless with chain restaurants with mediocre food and service scoring at or above legitimately worthwhile restaurants. I don't know whether to attribute that to the gaming of reviews or the pedestrian tastes of the Yelp reviewers in my area.

The quantity of reviews is super important. Anybody can build a 5 star rating by getting 3 friends to post reviews. Do these restaurants with "mediocre food" have many reviews?

Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut

#84

Post by Mikeb85 »

ilikehurdles wrote: post #24
kadabra9 wrote: post #12

Yelp is such a slimy company. First they wall off their mobile web reviews to try to force you to download their POS app, they have the whole extortion racket going trying to strongarm restaurants into paying for advertising, and now this. Friendly reminder - if you are on mobile and trying to read a Yelp review and don't want to download their app, simply hold refresh, click "request desktop site" and it will load t…

https://www.yelp-support.com/article/Does-Yelp-extort-small-... I've kind of gotten tired of diving into the whole "yelp extorted my brother's cousin's friend's coworker's business for better ratings" anecdotal story schtick so I'm just going to link the above -- or are you suggesting they're getting away with lying on official communication? If yelp is altering reviews for paying clients, please show the evidence as…

Except in this case there's a million anecdotal stories about Yelp doing this. I've been in the restaurant industry a long time, I've taken calls from Yelp sales agents, they're shit. And their sales pitch basically is extortion (pay us to hide your bad reviews, or else). I've seen owners straight up tell them to fuck off.

Thankfully they have zero traction here; my last place had a 4.5 rating on Google with 250+ reviews, and a 3.3 rating on Yelp with about 10 reviews.

Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut

#85

Post by ilikehurdles »

Kique wrote: post #71
ilikehurdles wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.yelp-support.com/article/Does-Yelp-extort-small-... I've kind of gotten tired of diving into the whole "yelp extorted my brother's cousin's friend's coworker's business for better ratings" anecdotal story schtick so I'm just going to link the above -- or are you suggesting they're getting away with lying on official communication? If yelp is altering reviews for paying clients, please show the evidence as…

The company I work for advertises pretty heavily on Yelp for our 150 locations, and the main perk isn't better ratings but having your bad reviews hidden behind a different sorting system. If you go on any Yelp business page today you will see that it isn't sorted by Date, it's sorted by "Yelp Sort". So if my business doesn't advertise on Yelp then maybe bad reviews will be on the first page of a Yelp Sorted ranking.…

From my experience, the reviews filtered out are often reviews by folks with small or no networks. I saw my wife's reviews filtered out when she first had an account, before she added friends or connected the account to facebook (not sure which one did it, this was years and years ago). I'm not saying this is a good system, just my observation of one factor.

Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut

#86

Post by NikolaNovak »

basch wrote: post #28
kadabra9 wrote: post #12

Yelp is such a slimy company. First they wall off their mobile web reviews to try to force you to download their POS app, they have the whole extortion racket going trying to strongarm restaurants into paying for advertising, and now this. Friendly reminder - if you are on mobile and trying to read a Yelp review and don't want to download their app, simply hold refresh, click "request desktop site" and it will load t…

Are other companies that have apps but not sites (or their site is just a download button) slimy? Should yelp not be allowed to pivot from website to app? I might not agree with that strategic direction as a customer, but its well within their right as a company to choose what they want to be.

Depending how you set your Criteria, certainly Facebook for example will try its darnest not to let you read your messages on mobile browser, but rather force you to download the messenger ️. I would personally characterize that as slimy and annoying; others may well disagree. Internets are also full of condemnation for Reddit's app vs website, and their attempt to force the app upon user.

Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut

#87

Post by kbenson »

ilikehurdles wrote: post #73
pavel_lishin wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In that story, the piggies couldn't file class action lawsuits against the wolf. If sites could lie without consequence in official business capacity, why would the average privacy policy take 18 minutes to read? I'm low on sleep today, so I'm honestly having a hard time parsing this argument. Are you saying that Yelp and other businesses are sufficiently afraid of class-action lawsuits that they're not willing to…

>I'm low on sleep today, so I'm honestly having a hard time parsing this argument. Are you saying that Yelp and other businesses are sufficiently afraid of class-action lawsuits that they're not willing to do shady things? Businesses doing shady things will dance around the allegation of shadiness with clever language, legalese, and PR-talk to avoid saying the truth. They will rarely intentionally give an unequivocal…

Or... just informally incentivize employees to do the wrong thing and make sure they have (or refuse to remove availability of) the tools they use to do so.

If yelp has salespeople that can alter reviews or how they show in any way, and those salespeople are incentivized to hit sales numbers, some subset of them will use the tools at their disposal to facilitate their sales.

In this theoretical scenario, is Yelp extorting businesses? No, it's just a few bad employees with an outside influence (and outsize sales numbers likely, too). But if Yelp knows about this and does nothing about it? It's gets more complicated then, and almost impossible to prove.

That's just one possible scenario where Yelp's statement is true, and the people reporting extortion are also being truthful, and depending on the details, Yelp is or isn't complicit in some way. A simple statement from either side doesn't really eliminate myriad possible situations like this, but given the number of reported instances of businesses having problems, I'm not so willing to discount that something is going on.

Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut

#88

Post by amluto »

Some of the practices in the article sound criminal. Grubhub appears to be recording conversations to which they are not a party as far as either the customer or the restaurant knows. The message they play does not sound like a notification that GrubHub is recording the call. I am not a lawyer, but I bet this is an illegal wiretap in at least one state.

Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut

#89

Post by SnowingXIV »

Yelp is terrible to work with. From my personal experience they've crossed over into spam territory. They will call, email, leave lengthy voicemails (with rather extortionist language), non-stop trying to get you to pay for their premium services.

Really slimy. I'm not one to advocate for big G but hoping them or Apple makes them irrelevant.

Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut

#90

Post by [deleted] »

tyingq wrote: post #81
Kique wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The company I work for advertises pretty heavily on Yelp for our 150 locations, and the main perk isn't better ratings but having your bad reviews hidden behind a different sorting system. If you go on any Yelp business page today you will see that it isn't sorted by Date, it's sorted by "Yelp Sort". So if my business doesn't advertise on Yelp then maybe bad reviews will be on the first page of a Yelp Sorted ranking.…

Is the extortion scheme as simple as that? Paying businesses get "Yelp Sort", non-payers get "Default Sort"? If so, that answers a lot of questions.

[deleted]
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