Yelp Inc. Refusal to investigate glitches in their cancelation - Extortion of funds -opinion- San Fransisco California

I have no court decision that proclaims that this company is guilty of extortion of funds, but rather this is my own opinion based on my experiences, and insight into that experience. Extortion is how their business practices feels to those hardworking business owners who have gone through something similar.

In my opinion, these scam artists shouldn't be allowed to legally do what they did and I hope that others might learn from this cautionary tale. I strongly urge anyone investigating whether or not they should advertise with Yelp to 1) read Yelp's own reviews on Yelp's page. 2) use Google to discover for yourself just how many other similar, extremely negative experiences others have had with this platform. It would be my suggestion that you stay away from this company and do anything you can to keep your information off of their platform so as not to assist them in any way.

These extortionists allowed me to create an ad, and then to cancel it just 3 days after I started it. I was not seeing any tangible results from the campaign, and therefore didn't feel like burning any more of my money. The only thing was ... they didn't cancel it! The ad ran for the rest of the month. Only after they took hundreds of dollars out of my account did I even realize the ad was still running. I called to dispute the charges. I demanded to speak to a supervisor. They told me that the chargers were going to be charged no matter what I did, and there was no "second tier" or "supervisor" that I could speak to, no place for me to report a bug, no options for me. They were going to take my money and I was never going to have any power to do anything about it, they claimed. After finding my own way to go around the support channel, someone from their support team (I assume this was a "higher tier" which they claimed they didn't have) called me back to my amazement. He wanted to offer me $300 in credit, essentially $200 MORE than I initially spent on the initial ad, and $140 MORE than I was disputing should have been refunded from square 1. I told them that I wasn't interested, that they had plenty of opportunities to offer me a refund, credit, or any sort of reconciliation and they didn't take it. Not only that, but after the $220ish ad campaign ran, I had ZERO results to show for it. Not ONE conversion. Compare that to 8-10% click conversion for Google Ads or Facebook Ads and it's laughable that anyone would consider this a viable advertising platform. I told them that if they had just done the right thing from the start they may have stood to make more money from me down the road. I asked them to, instead of give me a $300 credit, simply refund the $140 that I initially requested. They declined. What an absolute joke. Enjoy that, Yelp. To put it into one final context for you, guess what my business does - I consult for businesses on advertising, marketing, SEO, and business management - in my opinion, you literally could not have picked a worse business to try to f*** over - and all over just $140.

Their business practices are disgusting. Their service & support is abysmal. They like to talk a big game about the results you'll get by advertising with them but, the exact same campaign running on Facebook Ads ($0.11/click and roughly 8% conversion rate) and Google Ads ($5.12/click and roughly 10% conversion rate) rendered just 3 confirmable clicks and 0% sales conversion for a campaign that ran nearly 1 full month and burned through just under $220.

YOU'VE BEEN WARNED.

STAY AWAY!