The Carnivorous Cons of Yelp By Peggy Arthur

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As some of you may know we have recently rebranded our company from Curl Kitchen to truly Natural Boutique. With rebranding comes realization. You should use your past experiences to dictate where your dollars go. Being a small business owner means making ever dollar count but how can you make every review your business receives via the various platform (Google +, Facebook, Yelp…) count? Lets examine one very popular platform that has been in the news recently – Yelp.  Yelp was recently accused of extortion to drive businesses to pay for advertising services http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-yelp-ratings-20140905-story.html.

During the process of rebranding I looked back to our Yelp page. In doing so I noticed out of the 9 reviews that we have received since our soft opening March 28, 2014 only 4 of them are recommended. You might be asking yourself the question how in the world do you have so many reviews in such a short period of time. We used what is called a “call to action” within our own organization we did not achieve the reviews by going through Yelp.


In the past we purchased a Yelp “call to action” and the value was not justified. Now I realize by using our own “call to action” the expense of the incentive did not justify the act; however, our cost was not as great as using Yelp directly. While Yelp can be of help it can also be a carnivorous creature if you are not cautious. Your customer service could be top notch and so can your offerings but if you do not appeal to the consumer at the right time your business could easily fall from 4 stars to 1 star.  Imagine yourself using a service such a Groupon to sell 1,000 eyebrow-threading vouchers. You sell out in the first week. You collect your money and appointments are rolling in but what happens when you cannot service 100 people at the same time? It is likely these consumers will turn to a platform such as Yelp to review your business and it more than likely will not be pretty. Once these reviews are posted they will not be removed your rating will forever be impacted. These poor reviews could sit atop each search engine making it impossible for you to secure new relationships. So today I leave you with this thought before making short run decisions look at your long run goals. 


 Photo Credit to Paulina Fadrowska

Peggy Arthur, MBA
Founder and Creator of Curl Kitchen ™ and Video Blogger
Connect with Peggy Arthur on Twitter @consciousafro and to get more information about products and services visit Peggy online at trulynaturalboutique.com

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