How to Create an App Like Yelp and Succeed
Do you dream of creating a research website similar to Google or its competitors? Let’s check out how to create an app like yelp, then, or similar and become a great competition on a local market with the help of our mobile app development services.
What Is Yelp?
Yelp is an alternative to the world popular search platform like Google, but a website for searching the local market, allowing users to add and browse ratings and reviews for services like restaurants and hair salons. As a result, Yelp was developed in 2004 and has become a well-known online directory for discovering local businesses. It has listings for everything from bars, restaurants, and cafes to hair salons, spas, and convenience stores. There are hundreds of reviews for popular businesses there. For browsers, the site provides elements of a social network.
Yelp may be more effective in terms of user intent and targeting while having less variety in comparison. Yelp users, who already represent a particular demographic that would be more applicable to local companies, are the driving force behind this comparison. Google, on the other hand, is a platform that is available everywhere.
How Yelp Works?
You can search Yelp using its website or the official iOS and Android smartphone and tablet applications. Results can be filtered by location, price range, and extras like delivery service, outdoor sitting, or the capacity for reservations. Listings are arranged according to company type.
Given that Yelp has a strong social component, it encourages users to provide written reviews, some star ratings, or photos of their interactions with each business they visit.
Each Yelp account has a pals list that may be expanded by connecting the app to Facebook and the phone or tablet’s contact book. Reviews published to Yelp may also be reviewed by other users, and prominent reviewers may be promoted to Yelp Elite status.
Yelp Statistics
Yelp provides factual information on all sorts of businesses or services based on user-written reviews. It has also to offer you some yelp facts & figures you need to know for 2023 that will help quicker understand if it’s worth developing apps like yelp or not. Here we go:
Yelp receives around 178 million monthly visits across its desktop, mobile, and app versions.
Each month, Yelp receives more than 178 million visitors to its various sites, and 90 million of them use mobile devices per month, with 33 million using applications and 57 million using mobile web browsers.
Over 35 is the average age of Yelp users.
Women make up 53% of Yelp users, while males make up 47%.
On Yelp, Home & Local services have the most positive reviews.
Before going to a place, 63.6% of customers will probably look up reviews on Google. 45.18% of people will start with Yelp.
When users browse Yelp, 82% of them have a purchase in mind.
In the US, Yelp dominates its market.
78% of Yelp users regularly use social media.
Only 12% of Yelp users visit the site more than once every week.
Yelp is a platform that links individuals with fantastic nearby businesses and is operated by the community. Yelp is a trusted source for millions of users to get helpful local business information, reviews, and images to guide their purchasing decisions. Yelp serves as a one-stop local platform that enables customers to quickly find, connect with, and transact with businesses in a variety of categories by making it simple to get service quotes, reserve a table at a restaurant, and more features. That’s why yelp-like platforms are so in vogue now.
Yelp Alternatives
Here are some of the most well-known websites similar to Yelp if you want to try out various services, either because you don’t like Yelp moderation or just want something to compare it to. These are them:
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Foursquare
With a few notable app like review exceptions, Foursquare is the website that most closely resembles Yelp. First of all, it limits users to posting “Tips,” which are succinct 200-character bits of advise on places and may come with an accompanying photo or a link to more information. Second, a more involved procedure that considers users’ responses to a series of questions about a business as well as how frequently people visit or leave “Tips” is used to rate businesses. Last but not least, Foursquare can suggest new establishments for you to check out based on data badges such as your past visits to specific locations, how highly you have rated specific establishments, and more.
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TripAdvisor
Since TripAdvisor used to be a division of Expedia, they both provide many of the same services for locating and reserving lodging for travel. However, a significant portion of what they do also involves their users ranking and reviewing popular tourist attractions’ local hot places, such as eateries, bars, theatres, sports arenas, spas, specialty stores, and more. If visitors enjoy it, so will locals appreciate it.
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MerchantCircle
With a strong emphasis on social media tools, MerchantCircle provides a place for local businesses to communicate with one another and their clients. In addition to locating nearby businesses, you can use MerchantCircle to look for local deals and promotions, learn what the neighborhood’s hot areas are said to be, and even ask other users for help with just about anything. Businesses are assigned a “Merchant Score” based on user ratings and reviews and how actively they participate in the community. This can include things like how many Facebook “likes” they receive, as well as elements like how frequently they respond to clients’ inquiries or problems, produce blog entries, send out mailings, provide discounts, or simply keep their data as current and accurate as you can.
Must-Have Features of Review Applications like Yelp in 2023
So let’s examine the essential components required to develop a Yelp-like app in order to construct your own review business app ok.
1. Evaluations and Scores
Naturally, a review app would only be complete with a component for reviews and ratings. Allowing consumers to rate the goods or services and give text, image, and video reviews is one way to implement this capability.
2. Login, Sign-Up, and Sign-In
Allowing users to join your review platform is another smart move. You must integrate sign-in and sign-up capabilities and take care of social login in order to accomplish this. The latter feature enables customers to sign into your app using their social media credentials.
3. A user’s account
Your app cannot function without user accounts because you have added the capability of registration and authorization to your application. Allow users to create bookmarks, check their reviews, and access their newsfeed, friends, and other profile features.
4. Enterprise Pages
Business pages resemble user accounts but have a more formal tone. Customers can read, comment on, and rate these company profiles. Give companies the ability to include a brief company description, images, and videos, as well as their opening and closing times and other useful details.
5. Tracking analytics and activity
This function is available for your review app’s professional accounts only. Thanks to this functionality, businesses may check the activity on their page and perform analytics. Companies will be able to enhance consumer interaction as a result.
6. Location-Based Filters and Search
Allowing users to access reviews of neighboring places would be nice. Thanks to the filter tool, they can then select venues based on the required category, such as eateries, hair salons, shopping malls, vehicle repair shops, etc.
7. Check-Ins
Users can validate their visitation to a certain location by using the check-in feature. This feature will also list the locations that users have visited.
8. Reminders
Almost every smartphone app includes a notification feature. You can use it to let users know about platform updates.
9. Uploading of media
The construction of a company review app benefits from this capability. Posting in-depth reviews with images or videos is necessary. Additionally, it is necessary in order to post material to a business page or change the avatar on a personal profile, etc.
10. Admin Console
You must incorporate the admin panel with the content management system, or CMS. You can use this feature to manage users, services, and content.
If we talk about the fundamental features, you now have a rough idea of how to create an app similar to Yelp. But this is only the start of your trip. By adding new features, you may enhance your app and engage users as well as scale your business.
How apps like Yelp makes money
Yelp earns revenue from partnerships, targeted ad sales to businesses on its network, and subscription fees from its service tools. Yelp’s business strategy is to link customers with local businesses at the crucial time when they are choosing where to spend their money in order to create value for both customers and companies.
Yelp generates income from three different sources: transactions (interactive consumer tools), advertising (CPC advertising), and other services (data licensing). In 2020, Yelp produced $873 million, 96% of that amount from advertising. Let’s examine each source of income in more depth.
Advertising
Yelp offers businesses of all sizes a variety of both free and paid advertising alternatives. Large local audiences can receive tailored search advertising from these products. Yelp records revenue from advertising services, such as advertising offered by partners, and company listings as advertising revenue. Yelp generates 96% of its revenue from advertising.
Transactions
Yelp provides consumer-interactive features to help smooth transactions between customers and the nearby companies listed on the site in addition to advertising goods. The main way to get these capabilities is through partner integration. Customers can order food for pickup and delivery through Yelp, with its relationship with Grubhub being the largest by both transaction volume and revenue.
Various Services
Through subscription services, licensing fees for use of Yelp data, and other non-advertising, non-transactional agreements, Yelp makes additional revenue.
How to build an app like Yelp step-by-step guide
How much time, money, and effort you invest in setting up the foundation will greatly impact how well you develop your Yelp-like app and attract the market. These steps will definitley lead you in the right direction.
Identify Your Niche
A few businesses are operating review platforms right now because the review market is rapidly expanding. Finding a niche and developing your brand around it is the first step to take as a novice looking to test the waters of the review market. Recognize that there are existing competitors in the market, and that in order to stand out, you must create a product for a certain market segment.
Define your audience
Finding your target audience is a crucial next step once you have successfully identified the niche you want to concentrate on. For example, you could center your brand on the cosmetics market. It would be ideal to conduct research on this audience’s gender makeup as well as its age range.
Discover Your Competitors
Understanding your competition and what they are doing in the market will help you succeed. The next step after coming to this conclusion is to seek for the flaws in their platforms or apps and develop your own app to address those issues. When doing this, concentrate on gathering feedback on how consumers interacted with the app.
Select a Monetization Strategy
Find out how your rivals have effectively monetized their sites. Synthesize your monetization plans using the information. To assist you make money, you can also come up with innovative strategies. When pitching to potential investors, keep in mind that the correct monetization tactics could be your golden goose. Placement of advertisements, commission on sales, subscriptions, and partnerships are all common monetization techniques.
Come up with your UVP
Every company provides a special value to its customers. Find your unique value proposition (UVP) if you want to avoid getting lost in the possibilities that are available to internet consumers, surfers, and aficionados. The thing that sets you apart from other market participants is your UVP.
Come up with your MVP
Let your features reflect the information you learned by taking the preceding steps. Just incorporate the functionalities that most accurately reflect your findings in your MVP. More features that consider your consumers’ needs and priorities are added as you expand.
Get a Good Development Team
Check over the services and prior projects of any development business you are considering employing to see whether they are a good fit for your project. Reputable businesses will have practical experience, strong business plans, and verifiable prices for their services.
Develop, Test, and Launch App
Make sure the development business you are dealing with has a quality assurance engineer on staff to test your app during development. This will guarantee that the product being generated is what you want.
How much does it cost to create an app like Yelp
Budgeting for a Yelp-like app is complicated because it depends on a number of different aspects, including:
- The quantity of features that will be present
- The quantity of times required to create the app
- The fee schedule of your development firm
- Where your development company is located.
However, an average expense estimate for developing your app total project budget in USD may reach about $94,668.00 yelp app cost or beyond.
Our Experience in mobile app development
With us, you gain access to a top team of developers who are acutely aware of what matters as well as years of experience from various projects. We are responsive, quick, and skilled. We’ve been creating our own products since we were young, so we approach every project as if it were our own software.
Without extensive searches or high recruiting fees, we swiftly and dynamically supply you with a mobile app developer team or individual engineers for any complexity project. Fireart gives you a flexible and economical method to grow your current staff without making long-term commitments and thereby address seasonal or emergency needs in mobile app or any other project development.
This enables you to swiftly and effectively accomplish your projects by giving you access to a broad pool of specialists with specialized talents who know ow how to make an app like yelp and beyond. This makes it possible for you to be flexible, competent, and scalable as necessary while still being able to respond fast and readily to your business changes. If there’s necessity to build an app like Yelp, let’s do that together!
Apple users value premium quality, which means they maintain the comfort of using apps. We will do our best to launch your iOS application. With vast experience, we will create an application and features that meet the needs of your users.
Besides, Android is the most widely used operating system in the world. With 2.5 billion active Android users, you can scale your business with an app. Our experienced developers know how to make your application attractive and interesting for the target audience.
The development of cross-platform applications is also our strong point. Cross-platform applications are a solution for both iOS and Android simultaneously. A single code base, ease of maintenance, reduced development costs are just a few of the benefits that cross-platform solutions provide.
Wrap up
Yelp is aware of the influence of useful content produced in a variety of formats on its website. And Yelp is far from being an ordinary review app. It’s not a mere search tool, either. It’s a data-rich corporation that may one day become the destination that all types of businesses turn to for customer insights. In case you need similar service, feel free to contact specialists who know how to build an app like yelp and may assist with software web design services and product development.
Although creating and marketing an app similar to Yelp won’t be simple, it will undoubtedly be rewarding. All you have to do is diligently adhere to the straightforward instructions of our specialists. Feel free to get in touch with us at if you have any additional questions on how to create a review app.
