Yelp for Business OwnersReviews 653

40 good reviews all buried in not recommended, 4 five star reviews in the past 8 days all removed and put into not recommended. We are a franchise with 5 offices and different ownership for each location, They place all negative reviews on 1 location 90% of which this management team never serviced it was out of their service area. You report this to Yelp and forget it they could give a $#*!. I wouldnt be a paid subscriber if they paid me to list and advertise

I was offered a promotion to start a free trial. I was walked through the process and told to register my bank card or credit card. I was assured that I would not be charged. I was denied the promotion 24 hours later and told by a sales Representative Kathleen that she will see what she can do and assured me that I would not be charged anything. My account was charged 260 which I did not authorize. I called yelp only to get the run around. For two weeks telling me they would call me back. I changed all banking info to make sure this would not happen again and somehow they accessed my information and got into my account which they now charged 360. My bank has opened a investigation but I have to wait up to 55 days. Big company scamming small business. Yelp left me in a horrible situation as I relied on my pay for my children and they stole it.

Yelp is a total scam! They are the most UN-honest review company i have ever dealt with. I asked why only bad reviews were being shown on my yelp page and they responded by saying "i have to pay to allow the good ones to appear". They say they take pride in giving customers a fair opinion on business but force the business owners to pay so that customers can get a true incite on them. What a shady business model yelp runs! I hope someone important looks into this one day.

There is a reason BBB has an Alert on the Yelp page: Pattern of Complaint which states: Businesses state that when speaking to sales representatives, they are sold ad campaigns for one price, but when they receive the invoice the amount changes.

I was given $300 in Advertising credits. I used $138.24 in July and $137.56 in August ($275.80 total) and called to cancel my advertising campaign. I was told twice I could not cancel and had to let the month run its course, even though the page clearly states CANCEL ANYTIME. NO COMMITMENT (I am looking at it).

I called to speak with someone who finally assured me that I had not gone over my credit in total charges and that I would not be charged anything and be cancelled immediately. The next month I was billed $40.02 on my credit card and after 6 attempts to resolve with the merchant they insist I am liable, even though my statements show the above amounts not exceeding $300.

We are a 1-year-old company, Yelp had been calling us to upgrade an pay I don't how much money a month... Make long story short we told them we were not interested... Months later we got 2 yelp reviews, what happens, they took them off. Why? We called and the girl on the phone told us it was because the customer posting the reviews did not contact us through Yelp directly... This is B. S, good thing there are other sources to build reviews.

Like many others here I tried to take advantage of the free ads as a new business startup.
I was painfully surprised to learn over $200 had been drafted from my checking account.
Evidently, somewhere along the line of setting up my yelp account with my new godaddy account, this was activated and then I was charged for leads I never saw or heard from. Can't even see visits on my website. Nothing but a fraud - avoid yelp at all costs.

My business was a recipient of numerous phone calls and emails daily. After failed attempts of being put on the "No Call" list and telling people that we are not interested, we decided to speak with one of the reps. I let him know that we are not interested but was very forward to the point of pestering until he could get me on the phone. Through the phone call, he gave statistics on search results and business like mine in the area. Here I told him again that I was not interested in any PAID ads as we do not need them. He let me know about Yelps "Free $300 dollars worth of Yelp Ads" and after stating that I am not interested in paying anything, assured me that the ads were free.

Well a month later and with the Yelps ads doing nothing for our business, I decided to cancel the ads service before the following month since it did not help in the month of August and therefore we did not want to pay for a service that did not help. Come first business day of September, my credit card get dinged with a $500+ charge from Yelp.

Currently have spoken to multiple Yelp reps and my credit card rep to explain my situation. Yelp reps have told me that they would be sending an email to get my payment reversed and looked at and I know that the calls are recorded and I told them to refer to them for calls in August regarding the situation. My credit card company understood and immediately refunded me but for some reason yelp continues to ding my account. I am waiting for the payment reverse paperwork that I was suppose to receive 10 mins after the call ended with the Yelp Rep but have not received anything. I had to call to request my credit card be taken off my Yelp account.

Everything is still in the works and I plan on updating this when I hear more but for now, please stay away from Yelp fellow business owners and continue to block and ignore their calls if you are getting them!

I own a popular small business. Yelp has their fast talking sales reps pressuring me to buy their ad services. I do not believe that any business should have to pay a "review" platform for services due to the obvious conflict of interest it represents. A review site should be just that, a review site, with no motive other than posting real opinions of consumers.
Since I will not sign up for a Yelp contract of $300 to $900 per month, they have hidden all the positive reviews that come to my business, and keep posting negative reviews. I would go as far to say that they have created additional fraudulent negative reviews.
Yelp controls the content that review users read. If the business pays, the review content is good. If the business does not pay, the review content is bad.
Yelp is a form of business extortion. It is at best; unethical, at worst; illegal.
I choose to ignore Yelp. Yeah, I could pay them for good reviews, but I wont be a victim of their scam. Less and less consumers take them seriously anyway.

Yelp is a vivid example of the new era American business ethics. Instead of creating a legitimate and trustworthy business model, they stoop to schemes and scams.

I regret that I got convinced to sign up for their ads after being offered $900 promo code and saying I will be only paying $300 a month and it turned out to be a DOUBLE of that. Super rude customer service I got hung up on. They also called other similar businesses and told them I have been successful with Yelp ads which is not true and tried to use my good name to convince them to sign up. I know that because other people contacted me to ask if that's true. I am pretty sure the only people who clicked on ads are the people yelp contacted to advertise and showed them my profile so hence where my $15 a click got spent on. Besides other curious about my yelp success businesses I got absolutely ZERO calls or any leads.

Their vetting process is silly and makes no sense. Why would you post a main picture of a hair cut under an eyelash extension page, without letting me change it to eyelash extensions and hair. There should be no reason i cant add hair to my page its not that hard. I have all the pictures to prove it. The people on chat are rude and of no help. It costs a small fortune, and i wish we could all find a better site to do the same thing. This review will not be recommended most likely lol.

I run a small gym. Most of my members live within 3 miles of the gym. After being solicited endlessly by Yelp sales person, I decided to give it a shot. After setting up and adding descriptions to their site and getting a bonus for... extra visibility and keep other ads off my page (what?) I found that traffic through our Yelp site did go up. After two weeks I check Yelp traffic and compared it traffic through my website and Google traffic. Yeah, traffic though Google went down... hmm. I cancelled Yelp and a few days later Google traffic to my site went up... I'm not accusing Yelp of anything. Just pointing out the analytics. For me $300 is an expensive lesson, but lesson learned.