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.
I worked for a solar company (smaller, not one of the big national ones) and my friend worked in marketing, so part of that was looking over the Yelp reviews and reaching out to people. Someone left this scathing one star review for us, but the person wasn’t a customer. The working theory around the office was it was a fake by a competitor or just a really confused person. But because it was bad the head-honchos got on my friend’s ass to get in touch with Yelp to get it removed or whatever. I think they ended up paying to have it moved or did some incentive with customers to get them to flood the page with 5 stars to balance it out. The way that Yelp scams is gross.
actually i can’t find the link but a bunch of social scientists were like … hmmm about this. And they created a fake frozen yogurt shop with a random address typed into google (i think it was a NJ city) and sure enough 1 star and 2 star reviews came pouring in about how their frozen yogurt was melted, or tasted bad or there were rats but the place never existed 🙂
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