Yelp for Business Owners

I was offered $300 dollars coupon by my GoDaddy hosting provider, so I could try Yelp. After two weeks of using I decided to stop my advertising campaign because of the price was too high and I did not get any customers, moreover, my profile was not yet complete. I remember, I canceled it at the end of October, and later, in a week, I entered to check if it was canceled. Everything was very confusing on their website and I remember that the campaign was in status "paused" or something like that. Later, on December 2, I noticed that my credit card was charged: YLP* YELP ADVERTISING Sale $217.66. I was shocked, and contacted support. They told me that they cannot issue the refund, and I might be charged once more up to the cancellation date, which I was. I did not receive any notifications or reminders about those payments, they just charged me!

Please do not waste money on yelp ads. Had a very bad experience with Yelp. Yelp ads completely failed. Mitchell Woody from Yelp ads offered me to test run for a week provided a credit of $150 and assured me that I will not be charged beyond that amount during the test run and he will review the performance after a week. I was monitoring the performance. I did not get any lead and they billed me $245 in 5 days. I immediately stopped the ads and took my card off. I called Mitchell several times but he never picked up, left voice mail - never got a call back from him. No review done after a week, Sent several emails- no reply from him so far. And the worst thing, today I received a call from Carlos for recovery of the amount and threaten me that they will send claim to debt collection agencies. In my 10+ years of digital marketing career, I never had such a bad experience. I had a very good rapport of Yelp in my mind which is now totally zero. They always email from "the Yelp Customer Success Team" which is a big lie. Totally failure.

RIP OFF! Do not advertise with yelp!
Maybe it's a good app for the consumers but TERRIBLE for business owners.
When we started a small company I have been getting lots of calls to start advertising with them. We were told our company would be on the 1st page. And of course it was not. We were promised that with our budget the most amount we would be spending a month is $150. Sure enough we were charged almost $500 the fist month working with them. When i called trying to understand where the charges came from customer representative was very rude and not helpful whatsoever! They said they can not help me and i agreed to that which is simply not true.
Unfortunately my bank was not able to help either to get my money back. If you decide to work with Yelp get that contract in writing. But i recommend not to work with them ever! All they can do is talk you into giving your credit card so they can steal your money. I have not seen any of the benefits that yelp was promising.
Also none of our customers were able to leave a review for us due to the Yelp recognition algorithm.

This company is a joke, do not under any circumstances create a business account with this company. They lied about everything on the initial call including costs!

I too fell for the free ad campaign. After I specifically told Micheal Gotham I was not interested, he said well in order to take advantage of the $300.00 of free ads I would have to give my CC information and that once the $300.00 was exhausted it would be a limit. Nothing would be charged. Well guess what? I was charged $803.00 for a product I did not want. THIS IS HIGH PRESSURE TACTICS AND USE A SCRIPT TO MAKE IT SEEM THEY ARE DOING YOU A FAVOR. DON'T TAKE THEIR CALLS. YOU'VE BEEN WARNED. Also, you cannot delete your payment information. Do what I did. I used another credit card. One that was ready to expire. Put that in, called my CC company and had a new one sent. LET THEM TRY TO CHARGE MY CARD NOW!

DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCE USE THIS COMPANY. There will be a day when they destroy your account demanding log in and passwords from 10 years ago. You will waste approximately 20 hours of your time trying to verify your identity. Not only will that not work, they will refuse to forward your emails so it is a sudden and complete disruption of your business. Then wait for it: They will keep billing you because of course, you can't log in to cancel!

I was misled on the free advertising – tried to cancel, but was told to give it more time and that I would not be billed next until November 1st. On Saturday 10/22 I was charged $100.84 and when I tried to cancel the voicemail stated that you were closed and that I would have to wait until Monday to reach customer service – but when I called Monday 10/24/2022 they stated that I would have had to call the day I cancelled (which was a Saturday) and that they would not refund me. I am so upset that the lady I spoke to less than I week ago said "no worries" – I should be refunded in full

As a young black small business owner who just opened her first shop with every single penny coming out of pocket and no other resources I AM PISSED that i was scammed by such a reputable company and something should be done about this. I came to this site to see if there was anyone else who had the same experience as i did and hundreds of others have. A very persuasive yelp representative also gave me a lengthy call in which i was convinced that i would receive a promotional credit of $500 to simply try out yelp business and drive traffic and that I would not be charged however weeks later a $409 charge showed up in my account with absolutely no traffic from yelp generated to my store yet they claimed 77 people clicked on my website and the few calls I received had absolutely nothing to do with my business. They are taking advantage of small business owners and it is entirely unethical. We work extremely hard for our money and to just scam people like this it's terrible. After i called to complain i was told to send in an inquiry form in which they responded nearly two weeks later notifying me that they would not refund me the money that was taken from my account.

I've had 4 ligament clients review me on yelp and their software has called all four of them fake, these are customers that live right here in my hometown and they all had my area code yet Yelp is saying that they came from out of state numbers and and they were solicited. Some guy with a California area code reviews me and gives me two star rating and that review was called real. He said I only responded with automated text messages and I don't have automated messages set up. I personally answer all emails and texts. 90%of the customers that call me from my Yelp page are from out of state numbers wanting me to do there jobs but they are out of town right now and they will mail me a check. I fell for this once and had them send a check and the check was fake. Yelp has kill any chance I did have of getting future business from my Yelp page and it just makes me look bad when people look at my page and this costs me money. They call me several times a week trying to get me to spend money with them and advertise on Yelp. I've told them my situation and not to call anymore yet they persist. I wish I had looked at their ratings before I set up my page, they have a 1.9 rating and there is definitely a reason for such a low rating. Don't set up a Yelp for business page, it will only cost you money in the end.

WHATEVER YOU DO, DO NOT BELIEVE A SINGLE WORD FROM THIS COMPANY! Unless you enjoy getting your hopes up that your business is going to be doing better. We went thru a 5 day emotional, stressful roller coaster of fake leads, no responses and totally lied to by their representative, who stated that he has opened 1000's of yelp business accounts and never had this problem, BULLS$#%!
We even saved the verbage from 2 prospective clients from 2 places and it was EXACTLY THE SAME! Trust me you will not want to have anything to do with Yelp! It will be one of your worst nightmares if you do!

After emailing their customer service WITH NO RESPONSE for over 1 week... I decided to try calling... first few times it went to voice mail! Then by some miracle someone answered, ALTHOUGH he never apologized for the trouble Ive had AND when he COULDN'T answer my problem he put me on hold and never came back! The call went back to their automated system which went nowhere!

I REALLY HOPE SOME SUPERVISOR WILL READ THIS AND DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!

I am a home inspector. My yelp site is "Gerardo Morabito Professional Home Inspector"
I spend $600 with Yelp and got no customers at all, only one non-customer gave me a bad review because I could not schedule on certain day/time, but I did not perform any service with this reviewer.
I have several positive reviews (I do have screenshots, PDFs showing my positive reviews) but in a few days the good ones disappear. I emailed them to help me and the answer over and over again is that a software recommend to show only that review?
So I am attaching pictures of my Four stars but they keep showing only one star on the live website.
I spoke with Lawyers and the cost to fix it is around $1500!
I wrote to BBB and they said no one can change the reviews, only the software.
HOW CAN WE TRUST IN YELP! If they show some (not all) the reviews?

I also was duped by YELP. Rep Hillary Schweitzer called and said she would not charge my card and did. I received a bill for $394. I immediately called in and naturally she wasn't available. I received a call from here supervisor Jennifer saying sorry this is a self service program and theres nothing we can do. They charge me $394 and I never authorized it... as of today I was still getting billed. I have an email where I said not to charge my personal card.
DO NOT SIGN UP WITH THEM
WATCH YOUR ACCOUNT THEY WILL BILL YOU FOR PAPER CLICKS
THIS IS A SCAM

The worst part about running my business is dealing with Yelp.

- Let's start with the good:
It's a necessary evil for local SEO and reviews from clients. It does help your local pages rank better if that's part of your marketing strategy.

- The bad:
I've had yelp business accounts for years and have gotten less than 0.5% of my clients from Yelp (without paying for their overpriced advertising) - whereas my organic Google and Google maps listings bring in 60% of my clients and Facebook and Instagram brings in around 30% of my clients FOR FREE!

They endlessly call and email you to hassle you to buy their advertising... If you have multiple locations this problem is magnified so much worse... I've asked to be placed on do-not call lists yet I still get some calls from them.

I have issues that the sales team says is "no problem to resolve" yet nothing gets resolved. Clearly, they don't care about serving their customers, they just want to make the sale.

Claiming and managing different locations is such a hassle. I don't understand why they don't have a better backend for business owners on mobile. It feels disorganized to me.

They charge for so many services that Google My Business gives you for free.

They place businesses and business reviews similar to yours ON YOUR PAGE and then expect you to pay to remove them...

This is the absolute worst business directory I've ever dealt with. It's just a constant headache with them.

I work for a small business and participated in a $300 intro coupon for it. Little did I know it would only take a short period of time to wipe out $300 and add a few hundred more. My boss, understandably, took the problem out of my hands, paid it, yadda, yadda, chewed my $#*!, I violated her trust, yadda, yadda, all thanks to Yelp. What she doesn't know it that I'm not done pursuing this issue. Yelp, I have taken on bigger cookies thank you. I'm coming for my boss's money, you bag of shriveled $#*!s. They also have THE WORST customer service. Everyone hates their job (given), and NO ONE THERE EVEN BOTHERS TO HIDE THAT THEY HATE THEIR JOB.

I am a restaurant owner and noticed that all my 5 star reviews on Yelp have mysteriously disappeared and left were 4 stars and below. What I also noticed is they keep all groupon reviews and they do not keep reviews from people who were recommended by friends or concierge or just by people who happen to walk in off the streets. This site is so unethical and is used against business owners! They bolster about some filtering system for user reviews however, I believe there is someone who takes down all the good ones when you do not advertise with them. I have been contacted numerous times to advertise and when I explain that I will not advertise because their site is unfair and unethical, a few days later 4 and 5 star reviews disappear. I have taken pictures of my reviews and then to see them taken down after a few days only to leave up the negative ones. Their is a class action law suit against Yelp for this very thing that they are doing. So all you Yelpers out there, do not take this yelp site seriously because you are not getting fair results. If they were a legitimate site you would be able to contact them but there is no way to get in direct contact with anyone from yelp. Emails are submitted to their sales department. This should be a red flag to everyone...