If you buy something through our links, we may earn money from our affiliate partners. Learn more.
Small businesses have turned to Yelp to get feedback from enthusiastic customers. They may soon turn to the site to generate sales as well. A new feature from Yelp, Yelp Platform, will allow small business owners to make sales directly from the customer review site.
The company announced roll out of its Yelp Platform recently. In a post on the official Yelp Web Log, Founder Jeremy Stoppelman explained:
Yelp connects people with great local businesses, giving users plenty of information to make spending decisions and allowing them to share those experiences online. What about those times when you discover a great business and want to book it directly on Yelp? Well, great news: today we’re introducing Yelp Platform, a new way to transact on Yelp.
Yelp users were once limited to posting reviews, photos, and other information about a restaurant or some other type of service-based business. Now they’ll be able to take that a step further and actually place orders.
Yelp is currently working with select restaurants across the country beginning with food delivery and pickup services. Check out pages for two restaurants already using the new Yelp delivery and pickup pages: Harry’s Italian Pizza Bar in New York City and Layaly Mediterranean Grill in San Francisco.
The company is also working with delivery.com and Eat24 on the roll out of the new ordering and delivery features.
How It Works
To use Yelp’s new pages simply select “Enter your deliver address” and then do so. Or select “Pickup” if you plan to visit the restaurant yourself to fetch your food. Then hit “Start Order” and use the simple order page to make your selection The new Yelp feature offers the perfect combination of word of mouth and e-commerce. Browse reviews of each business by fellow customers then order from the business of your choice all on the same page.
Eventually Stoppelman says customers will be able to order delivery from thousands of restaurants in the U.S. The company next plans to introduce other categories of business like dentist offices, yoga studios, spas and salons, he added.
Image: Wikipedia and Yelp Official Blog
Good to see that a successful company is staying on top of trends and constantly evolving.
Great to see Yelp evolving! We cannot wait to utilize the ordering tool for our company gatheries & meetings. Great job Yelp!
Yelp Class Action
Get paid for all the reviews that you wrote for Yelp! over the years.
Federal and State laws state that as Yelp! had the right to control you as a reviewer/writer and as the reviews you wrote were essential* to their business of reviewing restaurants and businesses that you must be paid wages for all the reviews you wrote.
We will ask the Court to award approximately $100 per review that you wrote. For example, if you wrote 650 reviews, we will ask the Court to order Yelp! to pay you your wages of $65,000.00. It doesn’t matter in the eyes of the law that you were convinced to work for Yelp! for free as you can’t legally waive your right to wages. As this is a class action, if you want to continue to work for Yelp! you can do so as it is likely that a multitude of Yelp! unpaid reviewers will share in the court ordered award.
Clearly Yelp! owes you wages under the Nature of the Business test. Yelp! admits that it would not exist if not for you, a reviewer. But we’d like to know about Yelp!’s control of you in writing a particular way, how you had to do things their way at every stage, disciplined you for not following their rules and fired you.
Go here and communicate with the 13th Amendment Law Firm (The 13th Amendment freed the slaves in 1865).
http://www.YelpClassAction.info
Mike
This is a great idea. Sometimes after reading reviews, you want the food ASAP but instead – you need to either physically walk/drive to the store or navigate through the website to figure out if ordering is viable. I’ve found it difficult to order for delivery from small businesses unless they’ve given me a menu before hand or I’ve eaten there before.
This is indeed a good initiative taken by Yelp converting their potential browsers into buyers. Now it will be a lot easier for anyone to order instantly after reading an item review. Did anyone here order any item? How long did the delivery take?