Being a relatively new pizzeria in San Francisco, Yelp is a big deal to me. Always had 4-4.5 stars in the previous places I managed but so far after 3 months, we’re stuck at 3.5 stars. We keep growing regardless(knock on wood), but I can’t help wondering how much more busier we’d be if we had a 4-star rating. My concept pushes the envelope a bit so that could be part of it and also I had trouble at first delivering my pan crust due to all the steam in the box inside the delivery bag but we’ve got it all set now. If we remove the 7 bad reviews, which are all about our pan crust on delivery, we’d be 4.5 stars. Yelp is huge in San Francisco and your rating can make or break your business. I refuse to ask customers to write reviews or post fake reviews like I’ve heard others doing. I want to earn the 4 stars the right way.
Just curious what everyone else’s Yelp rating is and how much you think it effects your business?
Also, if you’re on or read Thrillist.com much, look for our article coming out this Thursday for Grinders Pizzeria woo! Life is good!
We have 2 stores at 4 and the other 2 at 4.5. The 2 at 4 are scraping the 4.5 mark, their average rating is about 4.2. We get calls just about every day from people that saw us on Yelp and decided to try us out. We don’t have a lot of Yelp reviewers in Socal like NoCal has. You have almost as many reviews as us and we have been at this since before Yelp was even a thought in someones mind. Its a great tool for correcting issues in service and quality. I always address complaints and make adjustments in our systems. Our rating has gone up over the years because of that. If I could get those other 2 locations to a 4.5 I would be a happy man. Most of our bad reviews revolve around delivery area. People feel that we should delivery farther out.
I have never bought into the concept of Yelp. I have to question any business that provides for “free” advertising for me. And the number of complaints i have read about this company, i would never do business with them.
I signed up for it before I heard all the horror stories. If it was run as straight forward as they let on, it could be useful. It’s not very popular in our area. We don’t have a review yet. Or at least none they are allowing to show anyway.
It’s like saying because you don’t buy Adwords, you don’t care what your search rank is on Google. You can choose not to do business with yelp, I dont, but to not care what your rating is or what information is on your profile is shortsighted, IMO. Your business WILL have a listing, you can either control the message and content or let someone else do it.
Furthermore, I don’t see why you wouldn’t monitor all the review sites to see what the public thinks about your place.
We have a 4.5 on Yelp, 100% on Urbanspoon and a 4.9 on facebook.
I deal with it by ignoring it, I believe it gives a mouthpiece to every “self-absorbed, gotta complain about petty stuff” person in the world and only enables them to continue with their own delusions of grandeur
I do hear many new customers say that they found us through online reviews, I do not ask which site, I reply with a simple “That’s great, thank you for visiting us”
When you see petty complaints like; “It was too warm or too loud for my comfort” that has no bearing on food quality or prices, I tend to write that off,
Yelp is kinda a regional thing. Its popular on the west coast and in big cities. I want to hear every single complaint whether its legit or not. I use them for making corrections in our systems, and for training youngsters on how to better handle dicey situations.
To quote Jon Taffer, you aren’t selling food, you’re selling an experience, pizza is just a vessel for you to deliver your experience. I get that some of them seem (and are petty), but if there were 15 reviews that all mentioned the temperature or the noise level, wouldn’t that be something you’d want to know? How does ignoring any site that gives the self absorbed generation make it go away? It’s still there, now you just don’t know what it says about your business.
I can understand not doing business with them (I don’t, and I recently ran a regression analysis that showed for my store, Yelp visits didn’t translate to better sales weeks), and I can understand not putting much stake in what it says as a consumer, but I’d absolutely want to know and control the content I can on the site.
My philosophy is if someone is talking about my business, I want to at least know what they’re saying.
You have a very valid point, and I totally agree with you.
But there are certain aspects of my operation that I have zero control over. I cannot control how raucous the crowd in our dining room is. Heck, I like it raucous in here. We are a fast casual establishment. Not a romantic date-night supper-club’ish restaurant. Especially on “Tomahawk Fall Ride” weekend when the lot is filled with a few dozen harleys or more. (mine being one of them)
I’ve had a pissy review where the patrons decided to lambast us because there was a line out the door of people waiting to order, and that the parking lot was also full so they had to park on the shoulder of the highway. Heck, we’ve had people set up the tailgate of their trucks as their choice to eat because we did not have room inside, on the deck, or on the lakefront.
I am landlocked between a federal highway, a lake, and a creek. I cannot increase my building size, I cannot increase my parking lot size, and I certainly cannot move the lake or the highway.
Just reinforcing my point of people going out of their way to be bungholes on many review sites, yelp seems to top the list of attracting petty whiners. UrbanSpoon does not attract such pettiness, I wonder why that is…
I currently have a 4 rating and can care less. I have a few fictitious posts and yelp won’t take them down. ( I’ve never offered a stuffed veggie slice) . and with all the negative info on yelp, I would never do business with them.
We have a 4.5 rating and as much as I dont like yelp we do advertise with them. We are new to the neighborhood and have been using them for exposure. You do not have to sign a contract with them in order to advertise with them. We do monthly advertising with them set a monthly budget and turn it off an on as we see fit just like you would with facebook or google ad words. People in our area use yelp a lot and when we do have the ads turned on we do see an increase in traffic to our website and and increase in sales its not huge but it is noticeable. We are also in a beach town that receives a lot of tourist traffic all throughout the year especially in the summer. We get people that come to our town from all over the world just to surf. This is how I expect these people to find us. Yes yelp is full of whiners that exaggerate about their experience but like other users mentioned if there is an ongoing problem in your shop you will see it being addressed on yelp. Im very concerned about what people write on yelp these are comments that other people are reading about your business even if they are taken out of context. We have a pizza restaurant in our city that was closed down due to rat infestation and yup I found this out on yelp from two reviewers who posted their health report through a link to the health dept website. Ive heard that their business is not doing well as of lately dont know if its directly related to this but if I was to see stuff like this I would avoid a place like this too. We live in an age where everything and anything about our businesses is found on the internet. Advertising through social media is a big thing for businesses nowadays and like them or not yelp is part of that.
An example of how to use Yelp to improve business. In another current thread we are talking about wing packaging. 3 years ago we were getting many 4 star reviews. They were all “great pizza but the wings were just ok” They were taking a star off for the “ok” wings. I contacted these people to get some more feed back. The consensus was that the wings were just a little too mushy. Not to the point where they were going to complain or refuse to order them again. Just to the level of not being excited about them. I spent close to a year testing better methods and systems for preparing and packaging our wings. Most of the ideas I got right from here on the Think Tank. Once I got the system down I put it in place and let it ride. Fast forward 2 years later we have doubled our wing sales and raised our average ticket nearly $4. This is information that I would not have known without Yelp. Its like free advice.
I guess my main point would be that if there were dozens and dozens of posts about the atmosphere, that would mean your market expects something else. I’m sure that isn’t the case, just using an extreme example to make a point. Like Capt Hook said, it’s free advice, why not take a look at it?
I could probably pull that off in the winter, but sadly we run at about 10% of our summer numbers when the tourists and vacation home owners bail out back to the big cities, or warmer climates when we do not need extra parking.
I do take the time to read each one and respond if they are negative but not belligerent. Just today I finally made contact with a guy who had posted a review claiming the deep dish pizza and deep dish cheesebread smelled like mildew. He claimed to have tried several times to complain and no responses - even saying he was hung up on at the shop. After chatting him about it - he re-posted today and changed his rating (he just wanted to be heard).
10 minutes ago I got this “DON’T EAT HERE OR ANY OF THEIR LOCATIONS. If you want food poisoning then go ahead.
Also the last time I ordered from them it took 2 hours to deliver 1 12 inch pizza and it was under cooked. Plus the delivery driver said “No tip? that’s shitty”. No what’s shitty is your response. YOU DELIVER Cardboard with some tomato paste and “cheese” and want a fat tip. LOL. Trust me on this, you are way better off ordering from Boss Lady Pizza or Pizza Hut, Dominos, Papa Johns, etc. THIS PLACE IS THE SHIT STAINS of the PIZZA BUSINESS.” This is the type of Yelp review that is mindless BS.
I clicked on the guy and it says he just joined and his only other rating was for a wing joint in my same area “If you like Fried Boneless asshole eat here. If anyone truly likes this dump then they must like food poisoning and an assortment of cooked asshole. THIS PLACE SUCKS! IT DOESN’T EVEN DESERVE 1 STAR!” Posted today as well. Obviously this guy is FAKE.
I do flag ones like this and 75% of them get removed.
Do I really care about my rating? Nope, but I do read them all and respond if needed. My shops have posted positive sales over the last year for over 100 weeks. Customer service is not a choice it is the only reason we are in business.
A yelp rating will always skew downward if you have any kind of interaction that is not face to face. Being that we all take the majority of our orders over the phone or online we have a bit of a handicap. There is a certain amount of disconnect that the customer feels with this process. We have all had times when we have been getting killed in the store and had a customer call and want to chit chat. We then are short with them and rush them thru the order. This customer may then feel that we do not provide good service and write a bad review. If this same customer walks in the store and sees how busy we are and how hard we are working they seem to be fine with our level or service even though it hasn’t changed from the call in order. This can be a tough business.