TaskHusky Curated Newsletter #034

Yelp! Takes Evil to a New Evilicious Level, Costco Gets Boxed, Shopify Gets Chatty, and more.

August 20, 2019

Yo - 

Happy Tuesday my fellow Entrepreneurial Enterprisers! 

I’m Sooooooo glad that action has picked up in the online business and marketing news. We have a TON of interesting things to talk about today, including new levels of weapons-grade corporate evil that just frosts my buns. If you are paying search-extortion payments to Yelp! – or know someone who is – you will be captivated by our first two stories, so let’s get to it, shall we?

1.  Yelp Takes eCommerce Evil to New Levels of Evilocity

First, I gotta say that Yelp!’s business model is kind of sucky. Their whole objective is to develop so much SEO link-juice that they jump in the path between people who want to buy stuff and you – the hard-working small-business entrepreneur. Then, they pit you against other small businesses to bid on top advertising space and charge you for every click-through. The sad thing is that they add no real value to the proposition in the process.

Looks like Jerry Stoppelman – CEO of Yelp! – woke up one morning, kicked a few orphans, and found a way to be even eviler. Here’s the scam ….

Yelp! would charge restaurants for top placement in local searches for users of the Yelp! app. In the background, Yelp! would identify which of those restaurants had signed up with GrubHub for food deliveries. You see, they had cut a secret affiliate deal with GrubHub to get a cut. Then, if a customer selected the restaurant, they would swap-out the restaurant’s phone number for the GrubHub phone number in the Yelp! app. 

Follow the money on this … they charge the restaurant for placement and swap-out the phone number so GrubHub can charge the restaurant too, then Yelp! gets a cut of that action. The restaurant pays twice for the same customer and both “services” take analytics credit for the sale. And there’s just no way we could make up this kind of shady stuff.

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2.  It’s Not Just a One-Time Thing … A History of Yelp!-ish Evil

But hey …. we’re forgiving folks. If this were a one-time thing, we might give Yelp! only a few snarky comments and a slap on the wrist. But Yelp! has a long and sordid history with ethics. Lots of reporters have been keeping lists of Yelp-ian misbehavior. 

. And as 

, Yelp! has had literally thousands of FTC complaints and no less than Harvard Business School started tracking their practice of false reviews. And just this year, a documentary was released called “Billion Dollar Bully” detailing their naughtiness. It’s available for streaming.

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If you are in a service business or a retailer in a local market, Yelp! is NOT your friend.

3.  Costco Is Thinking About the Box(ed)

There is a startup out there angling for the bulk products market, and it ain’t Amazon.

While Amazon moved from plotting the destruction of electronics and toys stores to toward the domination of grocery and online prescriptions, Chieh Huang – CEO of Boxed – decided to take the online fight to Costco and Sam’s Club. So, if you decide that the large 26.5 oz jar of Nutella 

 ($0.41 per oz) is just not enough, you can mosey on over to Boxed.com or the Boxed app and 

 ($0.24 per oz).

They have a “Boxed for Business” service too, so it could be great for small businesses like us to get snacks and scotch tape. The media is saying things like “great for millennials who don’t have time to shop.” But we say, “great for soccer Mom’s that can’t keep enough snacks in the house to feed all the kids.”

There is a picture of Chieh Huang on their website … he looks nice. I hope he’s successful, but not so much that he gets eaten alive by Jeff Baggy-Pants Bezos as an appetizer.

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4.  Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here

Cart abandonment …. TOTALLY sucks. You spend all that time and effort getting folks to your site and they click “BUY.” But then they don’t REALLY buy … they sort of drift off into the ether of the internet leaving us with a profound sense of melancholy, gazing into our analytics asking … “why did you leave?”

And then you have to retarget the crap out of ‘em. Here are some real deal stats that might help, or at least make you feel better.

  • The global online shopping abandonment rate spiked in 2011, but has generally been steadily increasing for fifteen years. It now stands at 69.57% (ooooof!).

  • By FAR the most abandonment occurs in the clothing category. Surprisingly, fitness equipment has the least … surprising because I abandoned my gym membership after a week.

  • 63% of shoppers said they abandoned carts due to surprise/high shipping and/or handling costs.

  • 46% of shoppers said they abandoned carts due to discount codes that did not work (been there).

Focus on that shipping stuff and triple check your promos people!

5.  Shopify Gets Chatty

The last time I checked, the Shopify marketplace had 77 live chat and/or text messaging apps for sale. All of the developers of those apps are now losing sleep and taking Pepto-Bismol. 

Last week Shopify announced that they were including a Live Chat feature in the core service. This comes a few weeks after Shopify announced Apple Business Chat – a service for communicating with iPhone users. The new Shopify Chat will eventually work with all major phones and browsers.

So far, the Shopify Chat thingy is getting spotty reviews – as of right now, it’s just not as good as some of the apps. And we wonder what Shopify’s endgame is here. But this is something that you should keep an eye on if you want to do the chat thing.

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I know, I know … it’s hard to believe that we’ve reached the end of another email. Time flies when you’re having fun and selling stuff online at the same time. We skewered evil and dropped some truth bombs on y’all. 

Don’t be “that guy” who reads entertaining and educational emails and then forgets to share. Nobody likes “that guy.”

Happy Selling,

Zachary