Comments on: GarageSeek Rates Mechanics, But Yelp Will Kill This Category Too

By: Ebay Motors

Ebay Motors — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 17:37:55 +0000

Ebay Motors…

Ebay Motors…

By: Saç Ekimi

Saç Ekimi — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 08:06:01 +0000

Sac ekimi Sac protezi

By: Automotive Blog » Comment on GarageSeek Rates Mechanics, But Yelp Will Kill This …

Mon, 01 Oct 2007 00:07:26 +0000

[...] India PRwire wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptThe auto parts/enthusiast space is several years behind the curve with most people only interacting through forums, and horizontal shopping, review, search engines don’t do very well with enthusiast auto. … [...]

By: scott

scott — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 20:44:56 +0000

The auto parts/enthusiast space is several years behind the curve with most people only interacting through forums, and horizontal shopping, review, search engines don’t do very well with enthusiast auto.

This leaves a lot of room for sites like http://Streetperformance.com (auto parts vertical shopping) and GarageSeek. You’d be surprised to learn how fast the $37 billion performance auto parts aftermarket is moving online.

By: Jim

Jim — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 17:34:35 +0000

Yelp ‘allegedly’ paid for reviews? Come on, they had ads all over craigslist for months looking for people to be paid reviewers in every new market they went into, same as Insider Pages and Judy’s book.

How is it still ‘alleged’ at this point.

By: Adrian

Adrian — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 17:15:37 +0000

A plug for Yelp rather than a review for GarageSeek, is it not?

By: Jackie

Jackie — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 14:56:26 +0000

For those of you outside the Bay area, Yelp also appears to be pretty popular in Chicago and the surrounding burbs (not trying to be obnoxious, just pointing it out). They do have Yelp user parties there too. I wasn’t aware that they charged business owners to participate though, but the paid user thing doesn’t surprise me in the least. I’m a freelance writer and you’d be amazed at all the “be an active user on my new social-networking/reviewing/bookmarking/insert web 2.0 function of choice here site” job postings I see (or maybe not).

I agree with the other posters that the mechanic thing seems a little…unlikely to work. After all, it’s not like cars need servicing that often unless you have a real lemon, and people don’t get passionate about their mechanics like they do restaurants or spas and salons (Yelp has proven to be very useful for that, at least in Chicago), unless they’re total gearheads. It seems that that this site would work better merged with, or as a component of, one of the existing popular car forums, blogs, or websites, otherwise the niche is too narrow.

If you want to see where people are creating awesome community-driven websites and other apps (and possibly win funding for your own idea if you’re entrepreneurial or innovative like that), check this out - http://newschallenge.org. There’s no paid-user or pay to play shenanigans going on there either.

By: sputnick

sputnick — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 10:56:02 +0000

Very insightful post, particularly the bit about how Yelp built up a user base. Thank you for this information.

By: YIU

YIU — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 07:34:36 +0000

I think a niche review site WILL ALWAYS BEAT the generalist site. Yelp I find particularly useless. But if a review site had hard core users with actual insight into what they were reviewing I might play. Just to reiterate. YELP IS USELESS, at least in Manhattan.

By: ELS

ELS — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 03:31:34 +0000

Outside of the bay area Yelp gets really weak.

By: Detroit

Detroit — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 02:53:04 +0000

A question for the General Motors of the valley: Why doesn’t eBay MOTORS deploy something like this?

By: whoopie

whoopie — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 02:51:52 +0000

its not up fpr debate if yelp is the category leader. at the minimum, yahoo local eclipses them in every metric, likely others.

yelp has the same problem that powerset has - their hype machine was run over by facebook

By: phenom

phenom — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 02:44:16 +0000

It will work only for car freaks.
http://vidsonly.blogspot.com

By: Startup News

Startup News — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 02:29:34 +0000

This kind of niche will work for a site that has access to car addicts otherwise a site like cardomian.com with about 2 million users can easily get all those users to give all kinds of auto related reviews ..

By: Jeff

Jeff — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 01:02:23 +0000

couldn’t agree with #26 more! Preach on brotha!

By: harish

harish — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 23:54:21 +0000

Yelp is not completely honest
Yelp removes bad reviews .I know one restaurant owner who received a bad review .Since he was a paying customer yelp sales person called him to check if he wanted to remove the review.But the owner let the bad review there as he thought that some bad reviews are necessary to make it look authentic.

By: citizen

citizen — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 23:45:38 +0000

I think the bigger question is whether Yelp will survive. Probably yes, but they won’t flourish. They are trying to become a neighborhood driven social network not just a review site and I think they’ll find themselves squarely in Facebook’s path unless they start creating more compelling Apps for fb themselves

By: Yelp Sucks

Yelp Sucks — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 23:37:54 +0000

Yelp is for 20 year olds… all vying for attention. The reviews read more like rants and I find that many of the recs are, well, just off.

Yes despite the paid shills on yelp (reminds me of payperpost), uptake outside of major cities is nil.

Yelp had it’s time in the sun, but with no viable business model the only way out is acquisition… While they had some success on the consumer side, they failed in signing up local businesses.

btw, free booz and beer at Yelp parties is not a sustainable business model.

By: Detroit

Detroit — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 23:37:24 +0000

Chris (1) wins, but in all seriousness: discounting segmented reviewing outlets simply because they serve a vertical as opposed to aggregation is not really a worthwhile argument.

Yelp’s benefit, as many have said, is that it has a community and other activities with greater frequency are well formed. If this site goes after building community, I can see it having legs.

Garage seek’s problem in building a community is that without a proper community platform, the frequency cycles are too long. Sorry, but in 2007 autos aren’t in need of service as much. This might be a little like watch batteries or roof repair — interesting to serve people who need information, but they don’t return often enough to make the acquisition cost/user worthwhile from a PV perspective.

By: Jasper

Jasper — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 23:30:13 +0000

I actually found my mechanic on Yelp and he is awesome. I think one player, probably Yelp, will dominate multiple segments.

By: Tradervic

Tradervic — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 23:20:47 +0000

Yep, this site will be totally dependent on new users. As Mr. Huen mentioned above, once a mechanic is found and the trust built..why come back? What other services do they offer to come back?…free oil change? Before one can consider this business viable, these questions must be answered.

By: Mike B

Mike B — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 23:20:45 +0000

Time to leave your bay area bubble. Yelp isn’t “all that” in most cities outside of San Francisco even with their big pile of VC booty. I imagine lots of niche based review sites can be successful, and most people aren’t going to trust the 20somethings of Yelp with reviews of Mechanics or much else beyond what local bar to hang out at.

By: Jimmy Huen

Jimmy Huen — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 23:08:48 +0000

I don’t care how good the reviews are, but if I only need it once a year to find a good and trusted garage, then what use of it is to me the rest of the 364 days?

On top of that, once I find a good trusted garage, what use is it to me at all after that? Would I visit once in a while just for the community? I doubt it.

By: Fedder

Fedder — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 23:05:10 +0000

I disagree with trevo. Yelp doesn’t have nearly the same network effects as eBay. In fact, in some cases, once I get a chance to see the quantity and quality of Yelp’s reviews, I might be more likely to post my review *elsewhere*.

By: trevo

trevo — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 23:01:06 +0000

Yeah.. FAR too many Spammy comments here. To you GarageSeek fanboyz… lay off a little, it is pretty obvious that you’re not regular TechCrunch posters.

The problem GarageSeek faces is getting their name out there. How does the regular joe user find out about GarageSeek? Everyone knows about Yelp so they’ll start there…

Think about eBay. How many PC auction sites are there? How many jewelry auction sites are there? Maybe a few super small niches, but by far and large eBay owns the market. Yelp is the eBay of reviews.