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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

#311

Post by flibble »

The “we bring you new customers” pitch that food portals is incredibly deceitful. Portals didn’t arrive on the scene with millions of customers to send to restaurants. They arrived with zero and siphoned them away using these dirty tricks (mini sites pretending to be made by the restaurant, phone numbers owned by the portals, requiring the portal stickers on the restaurants’ windows).

This blog post shows what happens when restaurants decide to leave portals: https://www.flipdish.com/ie/the-effects-of-leaving-costly-fo...

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

#312

Post by delfinom »

asdff wrote: post #215
loceng wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole VC-funded industrial complex and their bad behaviours will start collapsing rapidly within 10 years - their bad behaviour and tactics have just gone on for too long; it could be faster, hard to predict exponentials.

Call me a cynic, but why should it stop if it works for the VCs? They don't care about the product or the devs or the users experience, just their return. Plenty of things on this world are absolutely abhorrent but continue to this day because they make someone good money.

Because regulation is coming, or the old saying "this is why we can't have nice things". They are making money out the ass but are conjuring up one hell of a storm that is about to brutalize the industry.

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

#313

Post by SilasX »

mabbo wrote: post #142

It feels as though much of tech has gone from helping people accomplish their goals efficiently to a business model of extracting rents while providing no or little value. In this example, what benefit is GrubHub providing to anyone? The person used Yelp solely to look up the phone number of a restaurant. GrubHub deserves 15% of his order for that? Why, because they made a deal to give X% of it to Yelp, and convinced…

>The person used Yelp solely to look up the phone number of a restaurant. GrubHub deserves 15% of his order for that?

Hah, that reminds me of what’s happening with the custom of tipping, where it’s expected for more and more places with less and less service:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18241477

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

#314

Post by ademarre »

chasedehan wrote: post #310
codinger wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with using another form of payment is I won't purchase from a small business online without PayPal. PayPal offers consumer protection so I can take a risk with a company I don't trust yet. if it goes bad I can file a complaint and it will almost always get resolved.

You don’t have to have paypal for that. You can easily contest any payment from your credit card.

Except you may have to deal with the inconvenience of changing your credit card number.

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

#315

Post by robocat »

wlesieutre wrote: post #285
foobarian wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the other side of the fence, it has been a lot more efficient to use a responsive design on all clients, so that small screens automatically get what used to be the mobile site. The benefit for us was we don't need to maintain separate code paths which turned out to be quite a bit of code/markup and caused a lot of problems over time.

Agreed, but unfortunately not how a lot of sites work (especially Google's properties) - they'll sniff a Mobile Safari user agent and say "Here's the gimpy phone edition with half the options missing!" 13" iPad Pro? Gimped version. 12" MacBook with a smaller screen and worse CPU/GPU performance? Full version! I would've thought that it'd be simpler to have one codebase and make some UI modifications so that it works…

Unfortunately if your site is interactive, you still need to know if dealing with touch versus keyboard.

For touch, extra spacing is needed around click targets (allow for fat fingers).

For some touch data entry, you need to allow for different input methods, because accessing symbols and numbers is different from a real keyboard versus a virtual keyboard. Also a virtual keyboard: covers some of the page, causes scroll, causes resize, can cause zoom, loses fixed headers. Avoiding the effects of those issues often requires some compromises.

For touch, you must register onclick events on a div near to an input that can be tapped. Otherwise the browser resizes the touch zone to be bigger than the actual input, and you can't tap the div.

There are many many subtleties to how browsers treat touch events and virtual keyboards

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

#316

Post by pavel_lishin »

ilikehurdles wrote: post #117
kbenson wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 exto…

>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. I've been threatened by SEO sales people that they can hurt my site's search rankings if I don't sign up for their service. There are robocallers[1] that pretend to be Google employees making these…

We're getting off topic; are you suggesting that the people calling small businesses claiming to be Yelp employees are lying about who they work for?

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

#317

Post by judge2020 »

ademarre wrote: post #314
chasedehan wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t have to have paypal for that. You can easily contest any payment from your credit card.

Except you may have to deal with the inconvenience of changing your credit card number.

Unless they stored the number and are using it at multiple "merchants", your bank can stop all transactions from them from going through. There's also virtual card services like privacy.com and those provided by multiple banks.

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

#318

Post by whyenot »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #204
lazerwalker wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't necessarily frame that as an inevitability of Dropbox as a product, as much as an inevitability of the traditional VC funding model. It's likely you could build a very healthy business selling people file syncing — I personally use a tiny minimalist Dropbox competitor that seems to be doing just fine. The hypergrowth demanded by investors when you take on $1.7B in funding is what's the challenge.

This was one of the biggest takeaways from the "Startup podcast". If you haven't heard it, it details Alex Blumberg (of this American Life fame) attempts to create a company producing high quality long form podcasts. At one point he and his partner are getting excited that they are on the road to profitability in 6 months. One of their VCs gets upset by this saying that targeting profitability is a sure way to end up…

For anyone that doesn't know, the startup (Gimlet Media) was purchased by Spotify for $230M this past February.

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

#319

Post by soup10 »

rurp wrote: post #265
soup10 wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth pointing out that Google shamelessly cloned Yelp and funnels everyone into using their clone when they search for restaurants. If Yelp is in desperate spot its because Google put them there.

Most companies face stiff competition and that's no reason to excuse immoral behavior. Not to mention that Google tried to acquire Yelp and was turned down. Either Yelp's plan to take on Google always included copious dark patterns, or their earlier plans totally failed and this is what they've fallen back on. Either way Yelp can't die soon enough.

What are you talking about stiff competition? Google just lazily cloned it and hijack the results of restaurant searches so they win by default.

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

#320

Post by layoutIfNeeded »

wlesieutre wrote: post #285
foobarian wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the other side of the fence, it has been a lot more efficient to use a responsive design on all clients, so that small screens automatically get what used to be the mobile site. The benefit for us was we don't need to maintain separate code paths which turned out to be quite a bit of code/markup and caused a lot of problems over time.

Agreed, but unfortunately not how a lot of sites work (especially Google's properties) - they'll sniff a Mobile Safari user agent and say "Here's the gimpy phone edition with half the options missing!" 13" iPad Pro? Gimped version. 12" MacBook with a smaller screen and worse CPU/GPU performance? Full version! I would've thought that it'd be simpler to have one codebase and make some UI modifications so that it works…

Come on, we both know the answer... They’re serving shitty versions for iPad users to force them to download their app which has much more invasive tracking abilities.
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