Want to find the best beret shop in Paris, or the finest crepes in Avignon? Now you can turn to Yelp for those answers. The popular user reviewed local directory just launched in France with its first non-English site.
The new site continues Yelp’s gradual international colonisation. The San Francisco company’s first cross border foray came more than a year and a half ago, when it launched in Canada. Early last year, Yelp came to the UK, and then opened shop in Ireland.
But the pace of new offerings looks set to pick up. “We will continue to roll out in Western Europe in the months ahead,” said Yelp chief operating officer Geoff Donaker.
Expansion should be easier these days, now that Yelp has some extra cash to play with thanks to January’s investment from Elevation Partners. That investment followed a scuttled bid by Google to buy the site for a reported $500m.
Launching in France was not, however, just a matter of translating the site. Mr Donaker said that launching in any new country — English speaking or not — is a complex task because Yelp requires a huge amount of local data, namely the listings for all those local businesses.
Yelp will begin with one “community manager” in Paris, and said that some Yelpers have been working to get some advance reviews up.
Why France? Mr Donaker gave a somewhat grandiose answer when asked. “It’s [about] Paris in a lot of ways,” he said. “Paris being the centre of Western culture.”
Perhaps. But there is a more obvious reason, too. “There are a lot of city guide products there, but there wasn’t a Yelp there yet,” said Mr Donaker. In other words, Yelp will have the market mostly to itself for now.
Don’t be surprised if local competitors sprout up. There are plenty of tech-savvy French entrepreneurs, and Yelp could encounter the same kind of friction with local businesses abroad that has caused it to stumble in the US.
But would-be rivals would be advised to hurry up. Because once cities start Yelping, they don’t seem to stop. “What we’ve seen so far in Canada, the UK and Ireland is that traffic patterns to those sites have outpaced what we saw in San Francisco in the early days,” said Mr Donaker.
