Trade Reviews Protects Business Owners from Yelp’s Unfair Filtered Reviews Practice

San Diego, CA - Trade Reviews, an Indigogo crowdfunding venture, launched a campaign designed to allow business owners to give and receive honest feedback and help protect one another from the unfair business practices of online review directories.

With the crowdfunding campaign, Trade Reviews aims to override the review filters and create a safe and easy platform for business owners to ethically represent their true reputation on major online review directories. The campaign is running on Indiegogo where interested business owners can learn more, get involved and donate.

 “Some business owners are struggling when it comes to their online reputation, specifically regarding the reviews which are often unfairly hidden, called 'filtered reviews',” says Steve Young, Founder of Trade Reviews. “Many people do not know it, but online directories own these reviews, and sites like Yelp, Google and others, often hide them at their discretion, which can cause a business’s star-rating to plummet which in turn hurts their sales.”

Mr. Young, who is an online reputation marketing expert, was recently interviewed for Billion Dollar Bully, an upcoming documentary by Prost Films, which investigates Yelp’s alleged unfair business practices such as review fabrication, review manipulation, and even extortion. In an article from Business Insider, it states that this documentary is igniting awareness on these pressing issues and is already affecting Yelp’s stock prices.

Mr. Young, who has worked in online marketing for years, has spoken with hundreds of businesses struggling with this same issue, so he was moved to take action.

“I was speaking to a business owner of a security alarm company recently, and he explained to me that he had worked for over 2 years to build up his 5 star rating on Yelp. Two months ago he woke up one morning and all of his reviews had been wiped away/filtered! All of them,” says Young. “Now he does not have a star rating or reputation at all, and it looks like he is out of business…When he called Yelp, they could not give him a reason why they filtered his reviews.”

Mr. Young explains there are thousands of similar cases like this, “Just go to Yelp.com and look up ‘Yelp’ and you will see over 5000 1-star reviews all centered around unethical business practices by Yelp.”

"Many of the sites do not tell you why they filter reviews or their exact formula for filtering. Some review directories have been accused of manipulating the reviews they show, while trying to extract advertising dollars from the business," says Young.

Trade Reviews’ website www.tradereviews.com explains their dedication to helping small businesses mitigate this increasing unethical practice of filtered reviews, and have devised a system that will allow business owners to level the playing field. For more information or to donate to this campaign, visit Indiegogo.