Merchant review website Yelp has a unique status in the eCommerce landscape, allowing customers the opportunity to peer review their favorite — and least favorite — restaurants and establishments. Consumers can directly interact with merchants on the platform, leaving comments that are available to help millions of fellow consumers peruse similar restaurants, goods and services.
“We offer consumers a great way to use Yelp that can make it easier to interact with the merchants they want to support,” said David McKie, director of Business Development at Yelp.
The company has also been enabling transactions for six years, launching its Cash Back service nearly a year ago.
“The merchant has the flexibility to set how much they want to offer as an amount of cash back,” McKie said. “Those offers generally range from 5 to 10 percent. Once [a] card is on file and linked, when a customer uses the card to pay online or at the location, the merchant recognizes the card as registered in the cash back program, and the back end handles the funds accordingly.”
The innovative option is still in the early days and optimizations need to be completed, but the education experience has been valuable, according to McKie. Customers love getting cash back, and the amount of cash back distributed over the last year has been eye-opening for the Yelp team.
Here are the numbers:
1,000,000 | Dollars distributed as cash back over the last year
100,000 | Number of merchants with which consumers can directly interact on Yelp
80 | Percentage of consumers who take action within one week of a Yelp visit
42 | Percentage of consumers who take action on the same day
13 | Number of years since Yelp’s founding
7.5 | Average percentage of cash back offered by Yelp merchants
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