Yelp: Food, Delivery & Reviews 12+

Dark Patterns Galore

Yelp used to be great. Now it’s… okay. Let’s put aside the predatory business practices that are ethically questionable and harm honest businesses for a moment. When you install the app, even with most privacy settings and notifications off you will still get regular red dot notifications telling you to check the app. Is it important? No. It’s either a notification telling you that XX number of people have seen your review or asking if you ended up going to a business you might have looked up. Is there a preference for this? No. The only option is to completely disable notifications - even though you might legitimately want notifications for certain events. This is called a dark pattern and I curse the product manager who prioritized this at the expense of the customer, all so you hit your OKRs. Next up are the sponsored results. They blend in seamlessly into the search with no real UI differentiation from the natural search results. Meaning on the mobile app, when you search for something, you need to scroll to the 4th or 5th result before you actually get an applicable result. Usually ads/sponsored results are mixed into the listings, but again, this is just another metric they need to hit. It’s so sad that we can’t enjoy a product that could be good.

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Yelp for business was a terrible decision.

I decided to pay for a yelp service that THEY CALLED ME FOR, I’m usually really carful but I thought yelp being such a highly downloaded and used app that I wouldn’t have an issue. They asked me if I wanted to pay to try out there service which basically sponsors my business and brings me phone calls. I was told I’d pay 60 dollars and they would match it and id get $120 worth of ads which would get me phone calls. I made it very clear I only wanted to spend the $60 and get the $120 worth of ads and see if I get any calls, even if I didn’t land the work I figured I’d at least get a couple calls and I could budget for a bigger spend next time around. They charged my account $600 something dollars. The only calls I’ve ever gotten is scam calls, I now get about 10-14 scam calls a day, A DAY from yelp. I have never got any customers from yelp, Even to this day years later. I get all my calls elsewhere, So not only did they lie to me to probably get commission but I’ve actually missed a bunch of customer calls due to so many scam calls coming though from yelp. Easily around 100k+worth of work missed due to being flooded from yelp, I mean calls after calls one after another. I am not the type of person who complains or writes bad reviews but imagine paying for a service just to get flooded with useless calls just to miss out on the real ones. If I could give yelp less than one star I would.