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.