Yelp’s Q3 revenues repeatedly surpass aforecasted goals – depicts power of consumer reviews platform

How many of you have connected with the wrong service providers when searching for local businesses like dentists, mechanics, plumbers, electricians or even chefs? With too many providers cluttering the local business market, you need to be sure about the service provider, before you can choose them. With too many options, you may land upon the wrong provider, or end up paying too much for a small service. This is where review/rating site development comes to your aid.

One such popular platform is Yelp. Let’s see how Yelp helps choose trusted service providers, and get the service completed at an economical rate. Yelp was founded with the purpose of locating local service providers in and around your locality. It is basically like a yellow pages listing online, but with a slight difference. You have the web 2.0 at work here, which is what creates the major difference. It brings in the consumer perspective into limelight, which helps you acquire the right service from the right provider in your locality.

Let’s say you have chosen to hire a cleaning service provider in your locality. Now, you obviously have certain set parameters, which you cannot ignore. This means, you want the provider to match the criteria set by you. For this, you can look for the consumer reviews on Yelp. Along with the business listing, you will get a look into the reviews. This will help you gauge if the service provider is genuine and whether or not they fit your set parameters.

Yelp recently reported the Q3 revenues, and the company has once again surpassed the forecasted revenue. The firm has been experiencing profitable quarters this year, and the goals have been fulfilled each time by the firm. Yelp is a consumer review platform, which offers genuine reviews, and desires to help the consumer in acquiring the right service. It is based on the peer-to-peer model, which has time and again proven to be necessary for consumer environment. It is a fact that consumers will relate to the reviews provided by another consumer, rather than believing the benefits stated by the brand. The success of this platform is basically because it closed the existent gap between consumer service needs, and finding the right provider to fulfill the needs, by asking other consumers to help.

Consumer Review Platforms: Why You Need Them?

Before going into the need for consumer review platform directly, let’s have a look at some facts that have been revealed about consumer reviews

• 61% of the consumers read reviews online before completing a purchase. Reviews are especially the need of the hour for ecommerce platforms
• A 4.6% conversion is expected if a product/service on the ecommerce platform has about 50 or more consumer reviews
• For about 63% of the consumers, reviews on the site from where they are purchasing is highly important
• Visitors who go through reviews as well as customer questions and answers are going to spend 11% more than those who don’t follow these reviews or questions

Consumer reviews give more credibility to the site than just writing the product description. There is a reason behind this. It goes back in time, when peer-to-peer reviews existed. Before buying a product, you would ideally ask the neighbors or friends on their experience with the product. Only, after hearing them out would you plan on buying the product. This same thing has been extended to the online websites. Now, people believe in the online peer community, and trusts their review. This is why consumer review websites fetch more conversions compared to regular websites without reviews. Based on the reviews, the website defines the brands that have topped the list. This occurs majorly because of the ranking app development.

This model is also important from online marketing perspective. It helps in enhancing your SEO by allowing you to use the perfect strategies and build your user base. User reviews have specific marketing importance too, which you cannot ignore.

The Revenue Model

One of the best business models for consumer review site is affiliate. Review sites play a pivotal role in conversions that happen at the websites. For each conversion, the review sites charge a certain commission, which helps in building their revenue. Apart from affiliate links, paid advertising or PPC is also another revenue model type that offers assured revenues.

Display advertising is also another form of revenue established for the review sites. Some sites have adopted backward integration as a revenue model, which has worked very well for them.

If you want to indulge in business directory development then you should consider the target audience and revenue model before getting started.