I did not write that page, but some of what it reports is similar to experiences I’ve had with Yelp at two, separate businesses.
The wine shop is a small neighborhood shop with extremely loyal customers. All our customer reviews were never anything but positive. Suddenly we were contacted by Yelp and asked if we wanted to upgrade (pay a premium) to some “gold” plan which would benefit us by allowing us to blah, blah, blah…
We politely declined since we really don’t have an ad or PR budget. All our exposure comes from the many, many charitable donations the store makes and hopefully the event is nice enough to mention us in their programing material. Seriously, we hardly ever refuse a donation request.
Soon after we decline to “upgrade”, customer posted reviews start disappearing from our listing. It was actually our loyal customers who notified us of this. I guess they went looking to read their review and saw it was gone. We chalked it up to computer glitches or whatnot. We’re really easygoing guys. Whatever…
Fast forward six months. We get another sales call form yelp and again decline to upgrade, but this time we watch the site. Postings go missing a mere hour after we decline to “upgrade”. It was like they were strong-arming us, saying “Look what we can do if you don’t pay.”
Del, I have the utmost respect for you and believe you wouldn’t work for an organization that operated this way. But I thought I’d let it be known that in other parts of the country Yelp does aparently operate this way. Plus I don’t think that most people know that the website charges businesses anything, ever. I, myself had assumed it was a free listing site that made money from ad banners and such.