Let me start off by saying I have been on Yelp since 2014 and have had, and currently still have, multiple business listings. At least at the time of this writing. I will also ad that I have a lot to lose by posting this review because my accounts average 4.9 - 5.0 stars with hundreds of reviews. I will be happy to privately verify myself and my Yelp accounts with TrustPilot. I have made multiple attempts to escalate issues to Yelp management only to be turned away multiple times. Therefore, i choose to share my experience with TrustPilot visitors.Yelp is useful as a directory and people seeking local businesses, especially food and beverage establishments. This is only helpful to new businesses that need directory listings and links back to their sites to help potential customers "find" their business.The Automated AlgorithmAI is only as good as the people programming it. Therefore, the algorithm is biased towards 5-star reviews more than 1-star reviews. This is likely a prioritization factor due to businesses "asking" for reviews from ONLY customers that have good experiences. This is sandbagging and actually NOT helpful for businesses. I believe reviews should be natural. However, Yelp does NOT offer a good system for evaluating 1-star or FAKE reviews and allows them to defame businesses without recourse or verification. While the system somewhat works, Yelp should do a better job to verify review authenticity. Especially if the company seeks advertising dollars form the very businesses it allows consumers to defame without verification or recourse.Expensive Advertising With Little Results$15/day is usually the minimum recommendation for advertising with $50-60/day being a sweet spot for many businesses. Thats $450-$3000.00/month in advertising revenue for Yelp and "leads", as they call them, for businesses. This ad spend is grossly inflated for the extremely limited results one will achieve. Yelp has all the data, keeps all the data, shares NONE of the data and charges you up the ass for advertising to compete to attempt to attract any of their traffic in an already crowded market space. Further, cancelling advertising is even more horrendous. Yelp used to make it impossible to manage your own advertising account. Back in 2015 and 2016, one could not start or stop advertising without going through a rep whose job was to upsell you every step of the way and keep you from cancelling the advertising campaign. Now, you cannot simply click on "Yelp Ads" menu to go to your advertising account, because that would make sense. Nope, it appears deliberately confusing to keep advertisers from cancelling. It is NOT user friendly but very sneaky and an easy way for Yelp to get another few days or months from advertisers.Advertising Add-On (Upselling)On top of the ad spend, Yelp will nickel and dime you for everything. Like keeping advertisers off your page, adding a business highlight, adding business logo, organizing photos into a slideshow, having a call to action ... etc. It is absolutely horrendous and a huge money grab by Yelp.com who claims to want to HELP businesses.Yelp does not care about helping businesses, only creating the largest database and exploiting the business that help build that database. Meanwhile, advertising spending is through the roof and businesses come and go creating more opportunity for Yelp.Customer ServiceDue to the Communications Decency Act of 1996, Section 230, Yelp is immune from defamatory statements placed on its site by users. While Yelp does offer a method to report fake reviews, it does NOT take careful consideration if you don't have a law degree and cannot articulate appropriately how the review does not violate the guidelines. However, once reported and decided Yelp will not consider any escalation of the issue. Yelp Customer Service just flat out refuses to help you or respond to inquiries to remedy situations under the pretense of fairness. But this just doesn't appear to be true for businesses. However, Yelp should be liable to allowing content to remain online when it has ANY reason to believe the content was placed under false pretenses. The algorithm should restrict 1-star reviews as much as 5-star review, and require user verification in some form.To me, it just seems like a huge money grab and a company we should be boycotting. The same money spend on Google, Facebook or Instagram ads will get us significantly more results and drive traffic to our web sites and storefronts.Know and understand what Yelp is helpful for and use it to your advantage. Do not trust Yelp with your advertising or ad spend.
