slight-weapons-malfunction:

kryptonians:

Yelp is crazy unethical. Even before I heard about this nonsense, I worked at a small business in San Francisco whose customer traffic was directly influenced by their cesspool of a site. 

Anyway, my supervisor and I worked hard to make sure every customer was happy. And we were succeeding! We had a perfect 5 star rating on Yelp! It was amazing! Then one day we got a 1 Star Rating on our Yelp Page. Someone from Pennsylvania left a nasty review on our site. It was scathing. 

Now, that’s not something that’s too far out of the realm of possibility for my job. While I sold mattresses in a brick and mortar, we also sold mattresses via Amazon and our online store and people from all over the country purchased mattresses from us. But I digress. The reason this is important is, well, where it gets dicey for Yelp.  Because sure enough, Yelp sent us an email telling us that if we paid some fee they would push all the bad reviews off the site. They were extorting money out of us!

And here’s where it gets really interesting. My supervisor contacted the customer to see if there was anything we could do to make them happy with their purchase, so they can change their review. But the customer in question had literally never heard of our company and obviously never purchased anything from us.

Yelp literally committed fraud, and it was only when we threatened to sue that they took the fraudulent review off of our page.

Yelp is awful.

Yelp is constantly trying to get my company to pay them in order to even show all the good reviews we have. We have ONE bad review out of many, and it was the only one that their “algorithm” showed on the front page or calculated into our total star rating. There’s no good reason for it either. The bad one was from 2011 and because of an employee that left the the company years ago. The rest are much more recent and glowing. Yelp essentially charges a monthly fee to show your true good rating, and disguise it as some kind of advertising bonus. It’s extortion, classic mafia tactics, and it can really kill small businesses. It’s disgusting.

And, as a consumer, you really can’t trust their reviews. The star rating is only based off the reviews they arbitrarily choose to show, and if the business isn’t paying them, they’re usually hiding the majority of the good ones.