Yelp for Business Owners

After advertising on Yelp Business for over 7 years, I have consistenly found customer service to be ignorant, non-responsive, and yes, downright stupid and ridiculous.

Their latest game was to overspend my minimum budget by hundreds of dollars a month. Yelp (surprise, surprise) completely ignored my email requests to resolve this issue. Multiple attempts of reaching them on the phone resulted in a hour on hold and being hung-up on.

I finally resorted to disputing the charges with my bank and in response YELP sent me an e-mail, instead of trying to resolve the issue stated, "In good faith" they were cancelling my advertising campaign, I have NEVER heard of anything so stupid and $#*!ed. STAY AWAY FROM THESE CLOWNS!

Yelp will destroy small business. They delete reviews they want add fake reviews. Won't remove personal info or change business info they hold your business hostage. Stay away from Yelp if you run a small business. It's detrimental. Horrible company. Check out other stories on Reddit

Honda needs to better communicate to customer on who handles pre certified warranties

Wanting to get help to start my own business wanting to do a cleaning serivce like washing cars cleaning inside and out

You work hard to please your customers, you pay a lot of money for advertising on Yelp and they decide to take down two of my customers 5 star reviews in a row, I'm using this site and paying a crap ton of money to advertise to try to boost my business and get more customers and the best way to do that is to allow potential new customers to see the reviews of past customers and see what they had to say about you and the quality of work you did. I am beyond pissed about this and when you call Yelp for an explanation they give you some BS reason for why it happened, I'm done with Yelp, I can take my money elsewhere and my suggestion to anyone thinking of advertising their business on Yelp is to do the same. Don't do it, advertise somewhere else. I've included pics of both reviews that were taken off of my page below.

It's a scam where Yelp bills you for miscellaneous charges. There is no value in enrolling in their digital marketing as you will be charged if even these adds don't being you a penny worth of business.

Please don't use Yelp for Business. They tell you that the service is free, then charge you for nothing and refuse to refund you for the nothing that they charged you without permission.

The Yelp ads are a scam, don't fall for there trap, don't even answer their emails, they will promise the world that they have a proven ROI, however as you see almost no positive feedback, don't get burnt like many have been, including me.

A Yelp sales agent "Business Success Manager" or whatever cold called me while I was driving, kept me on the line by promising me sales/leads that same night and that she was "personally invested" in my business because it's woman-owned and that she'd love to keep in touch...then I never heard from her again. She made me stop and download the app, told me I wouldn't be charged because I had a $300 ad credit, and then made me add my credit card info anyway. It's like a scammer they lure you in so hard you can't hang up. I could have caused an accident on the road I told her to call back but this b*tch only cared about her commission. I've lost almost $200 since they rejected my refund request. Do not trust Yelp.

After one phone call with a rushed salesman. A salesman who forced me to put a credit card as a place holder to get to the next page. Apparently signed me up for ads that ran daily. The card I put in was now costing 19 a day until our threshold of 480 monthly. I received an email letting me know that my ad was going well? I never agreed to that. I went ahead and cancelled the service and they forwarded my bill for 96 and change. The customer representative put me on hold so she could listen to my call. Not only was she rude when she returned she tried to gaslight me into thinking the salesman gave me full details on the call and told me my card would be run. All lies and my business is still out the money. I'd say the forced usage of Yelp Business experience did not impress nor did it come close to worthy of their price tag during the 7 days they claimed. Yielding an actual call or website click outside of my own would have been a plus.

I am small business owner of a salon and I wasn't gaining customer due to the area I was in. It was a very dead area. I managed to run ads and got customers in. One day I received so many calls from yelp saying our ads will help you out. They lead me into the $300 budget instead charged me $900 first they charged 300 IN THE SAME MONTH.
And said they don't give refunds. Mind you I wouldn't care if they even took $900 BUT AT LEAST GIVE MY BUSINESS EXPOSURE! They will hide all the 200 GOOD REVIEWS AND SHOW 50 Bad reviews on ur business page. Do not trust them please if u are a small business owner stay away from yelp!

As a Realtor my business relies heavily on Leads. I have received several leads interested in my services. Some have specific requests and I am specific in my responses! Main problem is having all the communication on Yelp. By not providing me any contact info of the 'lead' we are locked into Yelp. I have sent leads photos of my business card and my full contact into. They never reply or reciprocate. My next replies will be asking them for contact info so I can reply to them more directly. Using Yelp as a line of communication between customer and business owner is seriously lacking. And by phone, nearly useless. Expecting your leads to go back into your Yelp to reply, is very short-sighted on Yelp's part.
If this continues this way, I am dropping my bus. Page. They say if I do my assigned page will continue
Which is no problem, as I don't plan to drop my business anytime in the near future. I just wont be able to get more leads, or make other changes. Which at this point is not an issue anymore with regards to Yelp!

If you get a call from a Yelp agent offering a free trial of their new marketing program that will get you leades/clicks to your website beware. They make it sound like free but then the costs quickly grow to thousands in a month. I reached out to their Customer Success and was told because the services are "self managed" they cannot help. So disappointing to see a company like this with deceptive practices that take advantage of customers.

Not only does their platform not work all the time to allow users to adjust budgets, they're extremely hard to get ahold of! Once you get ahold of them, the "supervisors" don't listen and aren't going to help at all. They also employ bots or people to run up your bill. I have proof of picture's of several accounts (I'll post) sent to me all with the same photo attached to them under different names. This is a giant scam and it should be illegal. Definitely search for different platforms!

I have used the yelp for business thinking the were giving me a 300 credit to get started for my coffee shop. Come to find out it end up costing me 500 or more for a few clicks and they make it hard for you to see what's active and what's being charged. The customer service was unhelpful. Please steer clear. All they care about is their bottom line and not yours.

Yelp contacted me and gave me a hard sell on using there service on a trial basis...ir was a total flop. When I cancelled the service they removed ALL OF MY POSITIVE reviews and only left the negative.

Called Yelp and they indicated that I would have to pay for a service to get them reinstated. This is clearly extortion and unethical.

Decided not to advertise with yelp and they misled me on how to cancel it. They make you go in and cancel it and it's very complicated. It never got completely cancelled due to the lengthy process and they trick you making you think its cancelled. They continued to bill me even though I called them explaining the situation. They would not give me a refund even though they wasted my time while they listened to my conversations them regarding the matter. They are a greedy company and I do not recommend wasting a dime on their advertising!

I tried to service out in the past for a few months and more recently for a few months and I find that a majority not all but a vast majority of the calls or request receive through the Yelp for business are people looking for pricing that falls in line with the unlicensed contractor or handyman type I don't find a disservice is beneficial to a licensed contractor possibly in the service industry for electrical plumbing so on and so forth HVAC but not for a contractor doing major renovations.
As most of all contractors know it is nearly impossible to compete with pricing from an unlicensed person that doesn't have Insurance liability Worker's Comp. Or licensure to pay for.

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!

Refused yelp ads. Biz not in local search anymore Reviews removed My Business is now not recommended

Yelp is the absolute worst service to pay for leads. They will charge you $15 for one or 1.5 leads per day if you are lucky and this doesn't equal sales. Business owners drive more traffic on Facebook, tiktok and Instagram for free. I asked for a $300 per month and in a month and a half my bill was $855. Most expensive clicks I've ever seen in 8 years. Long wait times for customer service. Waiting more than an hour on hold.

You cant get and keep legit reviews unless you pay them this is not okay.I have had many People tell me they have left my business a review one day I see them.Then I get a call from a unrecognized number with some who has such a strong middle eastern accent I cant understand them so I figure its spam so i hang up cause what's the point I don't understand them any ways then boom my reviews are all gone like they never happened. Like I said its a money grab.

I am a small business owner in Fremont, California. I have been advertising on Yelp for the past 5-6 years. Recently, I noticed that my business performance is way down compared to last year and after doing some research, I realized that I am not getting same number of customers from Yelp compared to last year. I started to do some digging and found out that even after I increased my budget from $4,000 to $5,000 per month, I am getting even less customers from Yelp than last month. I did some more research and found out that Yelp has increased the cost of "pay-per-click" over 50%. We as advertisers do not choose the cost per click, Yelp does (unlike google and other platforms) and the way they do it by making advertisers to believe there is an automatic auction and other factors that can change the cost per click, misleading verbiage. Basically, what Yelp does is to calculate the cost per click based on my monthly budget divided by the number of clicks. Another words, if they underperform or cut their cost down on advertising to generate more revenue, I pay a higher price for Yelp. Or if there is a slow month, Yelp does not care, they get paid no matter what. To give you an idea, if there are 100,000 clicks per month in one region generated by Yelp and total budget for that region is $400,000, the cost per click would be $4, but if next month there are 50,000 clicks for the same region, then the cost per click goes up to $8 for Yelp to make the same revenue of $400,000.
I called Yelp and talked to two different people and they had no answer and even they agreed with me, there was nothing they could do about it nor gave me a number for their superior. I have spoken to many other Yelp advertisers and they all feel they are getting cheated out of their money. My $5,000 budget is exactly how much Yelp charges my card, $5,000, not a penny less or more. What Yelp is doing is exactly like if I charge my customers 50% more simply because I had a slow month!
I have spent over $250,000 on Yelp over the past few years and I think I have been overcharged over $100,000.
I advertised on Google in the past, the difference is that I get to pick the cost per click for keywords and my budget was $4,000 per month, at the end of the month it was never $4,000 but close to it ($3,500 to $3,900), simply number of clicks multiplied by cost that I picked.
Look into your account and you will see, and if you can find a way to do something about it, please don't hesitate to share