Day 9 - Will Google Take Over Local Retail As Well?
Google lost its antitrust case with Yelp. That hasn't stopped it from becoming the biggest player in reviews, flights, video, email, and possibly now... retail?
This is part 9 of a series on validating a product that seeks to connect local shoppers with local stores called ListIt. You can see the whole series here, or read yesterday’s article here.
I remember the Yelp days. When anyone could move to San Francisco and get a sales job and pay their rent. I believe it was just before I moved there in 2014, because by the time I got to my dream city by the bay the dream had exploded. The entry-level $35,000 per year wasn’t going to cut it anymore in a city consistently ranked among the most expensive on earth. Yelp employees were penning open letters to their CEO about having to live on white rice and water and borrow money to commute to work.
But the death knell for Yelp was separate from that and came about around the same time. Before, whenever you Google searched a restaurant, the first result was usually the Yelp.com page for the business, and its customer reviews. Around the same time as the rice incident, and the protests over Google’s tech buses that shuttle employees past its impoverished citizens down to Mountain View, Silicon Valley for a comfortable 10 - 4, Google was launching its own reviews service and began down-ranking Yelp so that users no longer saw its pages.
Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO of Yelp, after a six year legal battle may have beaten Google in a lawsuit over that downranking- but his business will never recover. Yelp has been relegated to a memory of the late 2000’s, like the Obama years, and ILoveMakkonen. To quote a search engine consultant’s article on which is better for small business: “Although many consumers use Yelp, you will have better results focusing on your Google reviews. Google receives way more traffic, supports the customer review process, and has a far better reputation among local businesses”.
To combat the ever-encroaching monopolism of Google and its appetites for all other technology realms, companies should build their own ecosystem not dependent on Google search for discovery. This is why ListIt is focusing on its mobile app. For one, if you don’t depend on Google search to acquire traffic, then you will be free from the effects of its downranking of competing services. Second, and the more important reason ListIt is building a mobile app for local retail, is that local business people don’t have time to learn to code and connect to APIs to feed into search engines.
They do- however- have time to snap a picture and upload it to the web for other people to search, like with Instagram.
Here’s hoping every tech business doesn’t go the way of Yelp, by relying too much on search engines who ultimately want to see them fail.
Do you like the idea? Dislike it? Simply have questions? Reach out to me directly at james@listit.one and be sure to check out our website ListIt.one for updates and the beta product sign-up.