Ashley Galliart wasn’t planning on making so many cupcakes.
A year ago, she opened Luscious Layers Bakery in Chicago’s Bucktown neighborhood as a wedding cake specialist, with additional treats, including cupcakes, for sale in her shop’s front case. Then the reviews started trickling in on Yelp, the Web site where users rate local businesses. Positive buzz drove customers to the store, many of them in search of cupcakes.
“Yelp views us very much as a cupcake bakery,” Galliart said. “We’ve ended up tweaking what we have available on a daily basis to accommodate what people expect. Now we make more cupcakes.”
There was a time when a business owner monitored satisfaction mainly by talking to customers. Online review communities started to change that dynamic between consumers and businesses. Now, a spate of lawsuits is putting the spotlight on the complicated relationship between businesses and the review sites.
Some business owners, like Galliart, have learned to adapt quickly and find success. Others chafe against what they see as unfair treatment by online review sites with outsized influence.
The leader in the space is San Francisco-based Yelp, which has drawn 30 million unique visitors in the last month and has more than 10 million reviews to date. In the past month, three class-action lawsuits have been filed alleging that Yelp representatives offered to remove or modify placement of negative reviews in exchange for advertising dollars.
This comes a year after dozens of businesses voiced similar allegations in articles published in several newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune. Yelp denied all allegations and stepped up outreach efforts to business owners, holding Webinars and meetings to explain how the site works and how they can publicly respond to reviews.
The burden to find the middle ground in a morass of reviews and responses often falls on readers….