Small Restaurant Out-Maneuvers Yelp In Reviews War

An anonymous reader writes Yelp has, for the past year or so, garnered a reputation for extorting businesses into paying for advertising on their site. Allegations include incessant calls for advertising contracts, automatic listing of a business, and suppressing good reviews should a business decide to opt out of paying Yelp for listing them. One small Italian trattoria, however, may have succeeded in flipping Yelp's legally sanctioned business practices in its favor. The owners of Botto Bistro in Redmond, CA, initially agreed to pay for advertising on Yelp one year ago apparently because they were tired of getting calls from Yelp's sales team. But even after buying advertising, the owners claim that they kept receiving calls. So they started a campaign to get as many one-star reviews as they could, even offering 25% discounts to customers. As of this writing they have 866, and a casual perusal of them reveals enthusiastic tongue-in-cheek support for the restaurant. One-star reviews, once Yelp's best scare tactic, is now this particular business's badge of quality. And they didn't even have to pay Yelp for it.

Comments

Same Business Model as the BBB

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like Yelp learned from the Better Business Bureau.

The BBB is fully funded by dues from member companies. They are even franchaised so each BBB is locally owned and operated.
The incentive to join the local BBB is that unresolved customer complains ("bad reviews") are deleted from the public record of member companies after a certain amount of time, it varies by franchaise but usually 1-2 years. While unresolved complaints against non-member companies are never deleted. So if you file a complaint against a non-member company, that isn't something that will necessarily help you but it is a sales-lead for the local BBB office.

This business model leads to the perverse result that you can't trust the records of BBB members but you can trust the records of non-members.

Re:Only cost them 25 percent of customer bills?

[BronsCon]

It's worse than that! The company I work for has one negative review on Yelp, but several positive reviews "pending" that they won't publish unless we pay them! And the negative review was over the fact that they didn't yet have a quote from us for custom work for which they hadn't provided us the requested details.

Looking at the page now, it does look like they published two of the positive reviews, but there are still a handful held in limbo. How long between the authoring and publishing of the negative review, though? No time at all.