Cerretini in his early restauranting days (Craig Lee / San Francisco Examiner) And whether intentionally or not, the platform had entrenched itself as the controller of every small business’s online reputation - and fate. As Cerretini knew, a mere half-star difference in a restaurant’s rating could increase peak-hours foot traffic by as much as 19%.īy the time Botto Bistro opened its doors in 2009, Yelp boasted some 26m unique visitors per month. Launched in 2004 by former PayPal employee Jeremy Stoppelman, the platform’s user-submitted 5-star rating system quickly became an integral part of every small business’s online footprint. Botto goes digitalĪs a restaurateur, Cerretini had been an early adopter of Yelp. The new location was everything he wanted: It was cheap, close to his loyal customers, and, best of all, unpretentious. “Then, I found this little place in Richmond, California.” “I thought everything was over,” he says. A young Cerretini takes a drink with his grandfather in Italy (via Davide Cerretini)īy the end of 2008, Cerretini lost everything and was forced to sell off his restaurant for a small sum of cash. With his gregarious personality and “Italian charm,” Cerretini became a staple of the community and established strong ties with loyal customers. In the mid-’90s, he immigrated to America to try his hand in the restaurant trade.Īfter years toiling in backroom kitchens, he went in with a partner and opened his first restaurant, Cacciucco Cucina Toscana, in Sausalito, California. A young chef’s journeyīorn to vineyard operators in Collemontanino, Italy, Cerretini enjoyed a childhood of culinary delights - home-cooked meals, pure ingredients, and simple cuisine. He’d had enough: It was time to pry the stars from the “cold, grubby hands of Yelpers” and take control of his own destiny.īut the move would set Cerretini at the center of a long-standing battle between Yelp and disgruntled business owners - a battle including cries of “extortion,” review manipulation, and predatory advertising tactics. Like many small businesses, it was enslaved to the whims of online reviewers, whose public dispatches could make or break its reputation. See, his Bay Area-based Italian joint, Botto Bistro, was at a crossroads. Adding to the confusion was that Yelp used to offer advertisers the ability to promote positive reviews on their profile pages - a feature that Yelp finally killed in April 2010, just a couple months after this class action lawsuit was originally filed.In 2014, chef Davide Cerretini advertised a special that would forever change his fate: Anyone who left his restaurant a 1-star review on Yelp would get 25% off a pizza. (And may not be the last.) From reading numerous articles over the years, anecdotal evidence suggests that Yelp’s sales staff can be overly aggressive in courting small business owners, while also unable to explain to small business owners why certain reviews remain on their Yelp business listing and others are filtered out - not a good combination for communicating with many SMBs. This isn’t the first time Yelp has been hit with accusations of wrongdoing. While we were confident that Yelp would ultimately prevail because we knew the allegations were false, it is helpful to have the matter resolved early so we can put these allegations behind us. In a blog post today, Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman called the lawsuits “misguided” and said he’s “pleased” that the lawsuit was dismissed with prejudice today, meaning it can’t be refiled. As CNET points out, that original suit was dismissed earlier this year and the plaintiffs were given a month to refile, which they did.
When the suit was first filed in February 2010, the plaintiffs - which included a veterinary hospital in Long Beach, California - claimed that Yelp’s sales team said it would remove a “false and defamatory review” only if the vet bought advertising at about $300 per month. A judge has thrown out a class action lawsuit filed against Yelp that alleged the company tried to extort small businesses by promising to remove negative reviews in exchange for money.
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