Yelp is Screwing Over Restaurants By Quietly Replacing Their Phone Numbers (vice.com) 181
A new report by Vice reveals yet another marketing tactic by Grubhub that attempts to maximize the commission fees it can charge to restaurants when customers order through the service. Yelp, a Grubhub partner, quietly hides a Grubhub-affiliated phone number when you choose to call a business from the Yelp app. An anonymous reader writes: According to Vice, a Yelp listing for a restaurant shows the correct phone number for the business. If users click to "order delivery or takeout," they are presented with the option to order through a deep-linked Grubhub app. However, if they click the actual phone number listed to call the business directly, the phone number that appears on the dialer is not the official one that is shown on the listing. Instead, a different number is used so that Grubhub could track it as a "marketing" call, giving the company the ability to bill restaurants upwards of 30 percent commission instead of fees as low as 3 percent. Further reading: Meal-Delivery Company GrubHub is Buying Thousands of Restaurant Web Addresses, Preventing Mom and Pop From Owning Their Slice of Internet.
bad rating (Score:5, Funny)
Yelp is going to get a bad Yelp review if they keep doing that.
Re:bad rating (Score:5, Insightful)
Yelp is going to filter those reviews.
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Yelp is going to filter those reviews.
Yes, but they'll have to pay Yelp lots to get it done. Where do you think their revenue numbers come from?
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That's a very good question.
giving the company the ability to bill restaurants upwards of 30 percent commission instead of fees as low as 3 percent.
You don't get to bill someone because you voluntarily provided a service to them. Well, you can, but there's no reason for them to pay that bill.
What's more likely is that the restaurants have entered into a contract with Yelp for this service. And if they didn't set any sort of limits on it, or Yelp's ability to manipulate it, that's 100% on them.
This sounds like a fake outrage story to me. Yelp can't just forward calls to you and then bill you for having done that. That's not h
Yep, because a small mom and pop (Score:5, Insightful)
Nope, the little pizza joint down the street just calls the team of lawyers they keep on retainer and has them vet every word of the contract. Easy peasy.
You're misunderstanding (Score:2)
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What's more likely is that the restaurants have entered into a contract with Yelp for this service
Either way, the cooperation between the two companies only started in October 2018. If your contract predates October 2018, you would have no way of foreseeing this. Yelp gets kickbacks for every commission dollar they earn for Grubhub this way.
Unilateral contracts are deserving of outrage all the time. Small businesses can only take it or leave it. And leaving it sometimes comes at a significant marketing disadvantage.
Re:bad rating (Score:4, Interesting)
Technically this is wire fraud. They're "intercepting" the call being made to the resturant (by displaying one number, then calling another).
Charge the company with wire fraud.
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Re: bad rating (Score:2)
"Oh come on. We all know the law no longer applies to companies owned by the Sandhill Road money cartel."
FTFY
Re:bad rating (Score:5, Insightful)
Not really. Its more akin to a protection racket than even traditional Yelp is. The pizza shop agreed to pay Grubhub 30% for referrals that Grubhub brought to the restaurant - very reasonable and in-line with a good coupon deal, a tried and true way of getting new customers. Grubhub then, in reality, paid off one of the main nationwide directory listings to bounce every single search through them in order to claim that a simple lookup should be considered as a referral.
The Google example would be if, simply because you're running google ads, google charged you at the PPC ad rate every time that anyone found you through their regular search engine results.
A more mafia example would be demanding 30% of your proceeds for "facilitating" things by not stopping your customers from entering the building.
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A better example.
How do you know that Google isn't also secretly replacing their phone numbers with a GrubHub referral number in exchange for money from GrubHub, or better yet doing it through Android instead of search results so they're monetizing Bing results as well (both of them)? You don't, and that's the whole point of this complaint. At some point, when an online resource claims that a number is a restaurant's number, and that when you click it that's what you'll be calling, you should be able to t
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So the pizza place paid for marketing, didn't set any limits on how much or what counts, and now is getting more than they wanted. Still their issue. They can stop doing business with Grubhub. Either it's a beneficial enough partnership that they want to continue it, or it's not and they bow out.
If you don't set limits in contracts, and you don't understand what your business partner is doing or how, yeah, you're going to get screwed. Part of being a business owner is knowing how to do business. And whether
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Referral agreements are commonplace. They could almost all be abused. Arguing that they should spell out in great detail every possible way in which they could be abused (such as paying the phone company to bounce your number through the redirect link, or paying your OS vendor to change the numbers when they see them) isn't realistic. Putting this burden on the referral recipient is why we have so many, many stupid laws - and also why that approach is never enough.
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That's a very good question.
giving the company the ability to bill restaurants upwards of 30 percent commission instead of fees as low as 3 percent.
You don't get to bill someone because you voluntarily provided a service to them. Well, you can, but there's no reason for them to pay that bill.
What's more likely is that the restaurants have entered into a contract with Yelp for this service. And if they didn't set any sort of limits on it, or Yelp's ability to manipulate it, that's 100% on them.
This sounds like a fake outrage story to me. Yelp can't just forward calls to you and then bill you for having done that. That's not how B2B services work.
You're proof-positive of the kind of comment that happens when someone only reads the summary and not TFA.
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Then give Slashdot a bad review also.
Re:Slashdot is an Online Tabloid (Score:5, Insightful)
NO ONE should be using these delivery apps. They screw the drivers AND the businesses.
Call the place you want food from directly. Don't deal with these leeches who just exist to transfer profit from delivery drivers, staff, and the restaurateurs themselves, and do it so dishonestly.
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Unless the restaurant doesn't have their own delivery, and pawns off their online ordering (and sometimes even the menu itself) to these apps.
Then the business is screwing themselves.
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NO ONE should be using these delivery apps. They screw the drivers AND the businesses.
Call the place you want food from directly. Don't deal with these leeches who just exist to transfer profit from delivery drivers, staff, and the restaurateurs themselves, and do it so dishonestly.
This, precisely.
But then, I live so far out in the sticks, that even Grubhub won't touch this part of the county I live in. On the other hand, there are little restaurants in towns that are within 20-25 minutes' drive of me (over twisty mountain roads, but...) I wonder if they try and sneak a cut of that, since I'm way outside of anywhere Grubhub would even want to reach? Guess it's one more reason to use a straight search engine to find a restaurant (and its number) instead of Yelp, I guess.
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Nothing wrong with using these services to find good restaurants, but instead of using the leeches to get food, call the restaurant directly, outside of the app, and give them (all) your business.
Re: Slashdot is an Online Tabloid (Score:3)
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Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Skip GrubHub/Yelp And Go "Old School" (Score:3, Funny)
Hey Mom! I'm out of pizza rolls, cheetos, and dew! Can you bring some more down to the basement! My guild is raiding!
Is it really worth it? (Score:3)
Yelp didn't remove word of mouth, which is free. What if restaurant operators just ignored Yelp and food delivery apps? Everyone I know depends on word of mouth for where to eat / order from.
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They'll take a double hit in revenue unfortunately... Good online ratings drive business...
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Online ratings and "buzz" drive rent more then they drive revenue.
A hole in the wall will persist for generations.
A franchise will persist as long as corporate supports them and either controls the land or deals in the background to combat ever-rising rent.
A hip new joint will die within 2 years of becoming popular.
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Online ratings and "buzz" drive rent more then they drive revenue.
A hole in the wall will persist for generations.
A franchise will persist as long as corporate supports them and either controls the land or deals in the background to combat ever-rising rent.
A hip new joint will die within 2 years of becoming popular.
And that is how we can all tell that you don't own a small business.
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They rely on word of mouth for the phone number? Or do they search the business name and tap on the Yelp entry in the search results?
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Everyone has s stash of takeout flyers - no need for Yelp. Literally no need. I don't need to read reviews about a place I've already ordered from, and I'm not going to bother looking up reviews about a place I'm going to eat at. The restaurant business is competitive enough that a place that's been around a decade or two is probably a safe bet.
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Why would Yelp forward calls to a restaurant that doesn't have a deal with them? It's not like Yelp will get any money from them without a contract.
Because Grubhub has an agreement with the restaurant. And Yelp has an agreement with Grubhub and gets kickbacks. Yelp is essentially committing fraud by saying that Grubhub referred the customer to the restaurant.
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Exactly. Imagine the outrage if it turned out that Firefox had been changing every Amazon URL into an affiliate link without the website or the customer's knowledge or approval.
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Re:Is it really worth it? (Score:5, Informative)
They rely on word of mouth for the phone number? Or do they search the business name and tap on the Yelp entry in the search results?
I usually search for a restaurant and its number on Google/Bing/Whatever... never bothered to use Yelp for that.
In a strange town and not sure where I want to eat? GoogleMaps -> "Restaurant"
Yelp doesn't even get involved...
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Yeah - I wasn't including educated, skilled Internet users. I'm talking about the people that don't even know the difference between an ad and a search result as it is.
Re:Is it really worth it? Double This ^^^ (Score:2)
Google maps for location and "brewery." Every decent brewery usually has really good and interesting local food. I was doing fire support in Santa Rosa a couple of years ago and walked into the small, out of town hotel discussing our dinner location (very small, obscure, locals place) as we passed the front desk guy. He popped off "that place is awesome!" and asked how we ever found it. Not Yelp...
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Everyone I know depends on word of mouth for where to eat / order from.
I would be curious to find out how many people still use word of mouth over aggregated reviews for recommendations. I generally try to actively avoid word of mouth for restaurant recommendations, or really any recommendations from a limited sample size.
I recently went on a vacation to a location where my boss has a lake house, and decided to trust a couple of his recommendations because he has generally given good food/wine suggestions in the past. It was a disaster. I ended up finding out he just had some
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Problem is, you gotta have a real strong BS filter... between brigading ("Hey! That restaurant said bad things about my ideology! nuke 'em on Yelp!"), and the general fact that most customers who are satisfied don't bother reviewing a place, but all the pissed-off ones are hyper-motivated to get on there and vent (for reasons real or imagined)... ?
Yeah, I don't generally trust reviews all that much anymore.
Order Directly â" please! (Score:1)
All online services take around 30% of the gross sales and then charge more on top for payment processing and other fees. The consumer ends up paying delivery fee on top of that. Might be a connection to increasing prices ... hmm ...
Order directly from the restaurant. Your local small business owner will thank you.
Re:Order Directly â" please! (Score:5, Informative)
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It's not unreasonable to expect that a phone number listed as being the one for a particular business, on a site that is largely informational, would be the phone number for that business..
The phone number displayed actually is the business phone number. When you click on a "call" button for delivery, it asks you if you want to call and tell you the number it will call. Go look at the article.
Still don't know what the problem is other than "Yelp gets a commission" + meaningless internet drama.
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How is that a problem? Why should anyone care what the number is?
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If you don't want to pay the commissions, don't make the deal with grubhub. Cancel your agreement with grubhub instead of complaining. Or raise prices to cover grubhub's commission.
Yelp has no obligation to you to have their app do what you want. If you were Yelp's customer, then they would have an obligation to you. But you aren't.
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The problem is there is no direct feedback to the consumer about the rising prices due to this so most consumers won't be aware. If a restaurant really wants to offset these costs they should charge more for orders through one of the online services. I suppose that's probably prohibited by the agreement they have with them though so an alternative is to raise prices across the board for take-out/delivery and then offer a "direct order discount" or some such thing. In this way you are much more likely to act
Re:Order Directly â" please! (Score:4, Informative)
These phone calls go straight to the restaurant. It's not an online service - it's a masked phone number. Through the agreement with Grubhub, any calls coming in on the special forwarding phone number get charged a referral commission. The consumer does not know they are not ordering direct.
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Better yet, why order for delivery? Go pick it up in person. Or sit down and eat there. Seriously, what is the deal with people too lazy to get their fat ass off the couch to go buy food?
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It fits their MO (Score:5, Interesting)
I have a friend in the restaurant business who had seen first hand how Yelp will refuse to remove abusive (haters and stalkers) reviewers for your restaurant unless you are paying them.
They managed to stake out a high-traffic piece of real estate and they are going to squeeze tolls out of everyone they possibly can.
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are you sure their food or service doesn't suck with certain server or cook?
I know some local hostile reviews that are 100% deserved
I have funny story about well known lawyer locator site for USA, they were listing a lawyer (formerly married to relative of mine) I happened to know was disbarred (and who is now in prison, haha) but they removed my factual review and sent me email that they would not tolerate such things and wouldn't remove listing... the things being the lawyer in question was disbarred, u
Extortion (Score:2)
are you sure their food or service doesn't suck with certain server or cook?
It very well might have bad food or service. Nobody is denying that such things happen. However...
I know some local hostile reviews that are 100% deserved
It's equally true that many local hostile review are 0% deserved. How are we as readers of such reviews to tell the difference? Yelp is aware of this and they are basically extorting restaurants in about the most unethical (and possibly illegal) way.
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The problem is that Yelp! is not policing the reviews, so the accurate and false ones are mixed and the user has no way of knowing what to believe.
Re: It fits their MO (Score:2)
Yelp totally polices their reviews. They just don't police for accuracy...
Ever been to Yelp HQ in San Francisco? They have some serious security concerns for a company that runs a restaurant review site. I.e. their racketeering-style business practices have made a lotta enemies. Pretty low employee morale too...
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That's why no one should use or trust Yelp. They're like the old mafia "Pay us protection or else..."
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Re: It fits their MO (Score:2)
I believe the technical term for Yelp's various acquisitions is "merger to monopoly".
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are you sure their food or service doesn't suck with certain server or cook?
That is a reasonable question and there is no question there are deserved negative reviews. Any restaurant can have a bad day or event (experienced my share) but professional reviewers always go back several times before filing a downbeat review for that reason. And then there are some that just shouldn't be in business.
However when you have a bunch of one star rants all filed within minutes of each other under different logins but about the exact same event, or every day for weeks on end and most of t
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You type like a edgy angsty 4chan / 8chan manlette. Better holler up the stairs for your mom to order you a pizza to calm you down, otherwise your self-loathing might reach a crescendo and you start posting manifestos and committing atrocities.
I quit using Yelp (Score:5, Interesting)
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Or we've forgotten what good food tastes like in America?
Definitely; I'd guess over a period of time stretching from the 50's to the 80's, to the industrialization of agriculture.
I know for a fact that our food has tasted like shit for a while, since I got to spend a month in NZ in '87 as a teenager and I recall lots of things being far more flavorful, especially dairy and eggs - I'd never seen dark orange yolks before...
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to the industrialization of agriculture
*due to the
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Re: I quit using Yelp (Score:2)
Early Yelp reviews were in fact crowdsourced and fairly reliable. Before Yelp bought up all their competitors and gained substantial monopoly power.
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Honestly, the photos are the value on Yelp. Does the food look good? Does the place look like a casual, locals place or a tourist place? Get the address and operating hours and go to Google Maps. Is this the only one, or are there more in the area?
You can increasingly get all that stuff from Google. I find a lot of bad photos in their reviews database, but there's useful ones as well. When I found out how crap Yelp was, I went to Tripadvisor; when it came out that they were burying reviews with rape allegations I started writing reviews for Google instead, though they have stopped asking me lately. Maybe I inadvertently turned on enough security features that they pretend they're not tracking me that much any more.
This is why you shouldn't use these services (Score:1)
15-20% cut? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a HUGE cut for putting up a phone number.
In the last 10 years or so Silicone Valley seems to be trying to insert itself as a virus into everything. This is just another example. Insert the special GrubHub number so customers all learn this number instead of the real one. Then take massive cuts of the profits for basically doing nothing.
We're right at the start of a huge tech-world backlash. Everyone loved tech about 10 years ago, it could do no wrong. Now the pendulum is starting to swing the other way as tech companies start eating the economy left and right.
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GrubHub's headquarters is in Chicago, so, again, that mistake pretty much invalidates your argument.
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Yelp is a parasite. Not every "tech company" is such a wormy Kendall faggot operation as Yelp.
Nowadays? It's a pretty good first approximation. Name one big-name Internet business that you can be enthusiastic about.
Like google? (Score:4, Informative)
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Google doesn't pretend to do one thing while actually doing another. Yelp is committing fraud.
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What they don't do is treat clicks on your actual organic search result as a click on your paid ad. That's effectively what Yelp is doing for Grubhub.
What's the problem? (Score:2)
If Yelp provides business to a restaurant and there's a commission agreement for that business, then what's the problem? Yelp is logging that they are the source of the referral so they can get paid according to their commission agreement. So?
The right thing would be for Yelp to provide referrals and not get paid for the service they provide? Why is that the right thing? Who does Yelp owe free service? Why?
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Yelp is charging the same amount for doing nothing more than providing a phone number as they do for actually taking the order and handling the delivery.
And they're lying about it to the customer, and probably to the business, too.
Welcome Grubhub to the unapproved vendors list! (Score:5, Interesting)
We recently stopped using Grubhub until the dust settled on the tip thievery, but this pretty much just put them over the top. They are the newest permanent member of a list of company's who's behavior towards their staff/others now prevents me from using their service with a clear conscience.
Congrats Grubhub!
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We've stopped using deliveries, in-house and third party, since this https://www.npr.org/2019/07/30... [npr.org]
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Yup, saw that shortly after the tip issue. That has made my wife and I cease delivery services where the restaurant doesn't have their own drivers. It doesn't guarantee that there will be no food shenanigans, but hopefully it drastically reduces the chances. What is strange is that it almost makes sense as folks who drive for them aren't even making a living wage. This of course does not excuse the gross behavior, but at least one can understand it.
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We recently stopped using Grubhub until the dust settled on the tip thievery
That was DoorDash. Also a horrible company, in my opinion [slashdot.org].
So? (Score:2)
I hate shady monetising shenanigans as much as the other guy, but 99% of the times a user searched for a venue for some service using Yelp, then Yelp provided the reach for that service to get to that user. There might be the odd case of users articulating Yelp and other platforms (e.g. Google Maps) as Yellow Pages of sorts (i.e. a directory), where they already know what they want, and in this particular case, the service provided by Yelp is less marketing and more of, well, a directory, which also used to
Re:So? (Score:5, Informative)
99% of the times a user searched for a venue for some service using Yelp, then Yelp provided the reach for that service to get to that user.
True. But the restaurant had an agreement with Grubhub for the 30%, not Yelp. Grubhub did NOT provide the means to acquire the customer. They did nothing but have a revenue-sharing scheme with Yelp.
They are taking a cut of commission they didn't earn by pretending that Grubhub did it.
Reposting for awareness (Score:5, Informative)
I posted this before, but it bears repeating: Yelp is a scumbag organization run by scumbags.
My wife's business is on Yelp, and I was getting 3 or 4 calls a week from a Yelp Account Rep named Anthony who was trying to get us to buy advertising.
I kept declining and I would tell him not to call back, we're not going to buy any advertising.
And yet he persisted, calling and calling and calling. I finally told him that if he called me again I was going to "hunt him down and beat him to death."
The calls stopped, but lo and behold, a couple days later we got our first bad review in over 2 years of business. And the review came from someone who supposedly lived over 1,000 miles away. Hmmm, what an amazing coincidence.
And whaddya know, Anthony called a couple days later and explained that if we bought advertising they could "push the bad reviews down the page" so people wouldn't see them.
My reply: "No thanks, fuckface, and don't call me again."
Haven't heard from them in over a year. Sometimes you just have to tell them to fuck off.
I've heard this same story line from over a dozen people who have businesses that I know personally. So yeah, Yelp is run by a bunch of fucking extortionists, no two ways about it.
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By now word of mouth should have destroyed Yelp.....
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And Comcast, and AT&T, and Microsoft, and..
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I mean, anyone could do what that 'rep' did. Sounds like a bluffing-extortion-scam to me.
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You know, that could have been a scam by someone other than Yelp.
I mean, anyone could do what that 'rep' did. Sounds like a bluffing-extortion-scam to me.
Nope, I'm pretty sure it was a 'legit' Yelp dickhead. The number he gave me did, in fact, connect to Yelp. I'm sure this is just part of their "wink, wink" business plan.
As for Anthony, if you're reading this, "Fuck you, and I hope you die in a fire."
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I don't remember when Yelp was ethical. (Score:2)
It's been deceptive, underhanded, thieving since i can recall being aware of it. Long overdue for a lawsuit and punishment.
But then, clickthrough and various scams run on the Internet constantly, so this is just more of the same. Feh. Who goes first?
Criminal (Score:2)
So glad I don't use Yelp or Grubhub....
- Yelp needs competition - (Score:2)
I'd like to see Craig Newmark branch out into that business. He's had plenty of opportunities to get greedy online and he has resisted. We need more people like him to bring us the internet that we had hoped for.
Why is the Web turning so evil? (Score:2)
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You mean corporations,,, the same folks that destroyed Vegas and removed the fun and affordability....
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Yeah Vegas so much better and moral when it was run by the Sicilian Mafia
Bwahahaha
Urky (Score:2)
I know that 'grub' is slang for food, but it still wouldn't feel quite right ordering food from something called GrubHub.
Amazing! (Score:2)
Re: Assholes. (Score:3, Insightful)
Please explain how capitalism is itself to blame for this? Then also explain how Yelp, an internet company, also works in non capitalist countries.
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OMG, It's "InternetMan: the Defender of Capitalism". Faster than a Russian botnet. Stronger than reCAPTCHAv3. Able to ask leading questions while providing no information.
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That's pretty dank. Haven't heard it before. Would mod up if I had points.