A Yelp Inc charge on your bank or credit card statement comes from Yelp Inc., the review and business directory platform, and it almost always traces back to a Yelp for Business account: paid advertising, a profile upgrade, a restaurant reservation subscription, or a promotional credit that ran out and converted to recurring billing. If nobody at your business knowingly signed up, the charge may have come from an employee with access to your payment method, or it may be unauthorized.
What the Charge Is Paying For
Yelp bills for a handful of business products, and matching the amount on your statement to one of them is the fastest way to figure out what’s happening.
Cost-Per-Click Advertising
Yelp’s main ad product charges you each time someone clicks your promoted listing. The per-click price moves with an automated auction and isn’t published as a fixed rate. Minimum monthly ad budgets start at $150, and non-term campaigns can be canceled at any time.1Yelp for Business. Yelp Local Business Pricing
Page Upgrades
Individual profile enhancements start at $1 per day each, and a bundled Upgrade Package runs $180 per month.1Yelp for Business. Yelp Local Business Pricing A combined ads-plus-upgrades bundle starts at $270 per month. Upgrades cover things like removing competitor ads from your page, adding a call-to-action button, and choosing the photo that appears first.2Yelp for Business. A Guide to Yelp Page Upgrades
Yelp Guest Manager
Restaurants and hospitality businesses may see a Guest Manager charge for digital reservations and waitlist software. Plans run from $129 to $349 per month.3Yelp for Business. Yelp Guest Manager – Restaurant Reservation System
Expired Promotional Credits
This is where most surprise charges come from. Yelp runs offers like a $300 upfront ad credit. Once the credit is used up, Yelp bills the payment method on file at whatever budget you chose during signup.4Yelp for Business. What Does My Yelp Advertising Offer Mean Boost offers work similarly: Yelp adds bonus ad budget while you meet a monthly spend, and the underlying charges keep running after the bonus period ends. If you accepted a promo and then forgot about it, that is the likeliest explanation.
Matching the Charge to an Invoice
Yelp charges usually appear with a merchant descriptor containing “YELP INC” or “YELP.COM,” sometimes with an ad reference tacked on. Wording varies by bank. You may also see a small temporary authorization hold before the real charge posts; Yelp uses these to confirm the card has funds available, and the hold drops off within a few days if no purchase completes.5Yelp for Business. What Is the Temporary Charge on My Statement
To pin the charge to a specific product, log in to Yelp for Business and open the billing page. Yelp provides itemized invoices that break each charge down by product.6Yelp. How Can I View My Yelp Advertising Charges Compare dates and amounts against your statement. If you run multiple locations, each has its own Business ID and separate billing inside the same dashboard.
If You Don’t Recognize the Charge At All
Not every unfamiliar charge is fraud. An employee, a former partner, or a marketing contractor with access to company payment information may have signed the business up. Ask around before assuming the worst.
If no one authorized it, Yelp has a support-center process for reporting unrecognized activity on a Yelp for Business account.7Yelp for Business. What Can I Do If I Don’t Recognize Activity in My Yelp for Business Account Call your bank or card issuer at the same time to flag the charge as unauthorized. Most banks give you 60 to 120 days from the statement date to dispute, so move quickly. If the charge is fraudulent, the issuer can reverse it and reissue the card.
Canceling Yelp Paid Services
How you cancel depends on whether you’re on a non-term plan or in a term contract.
On a non-term plan, cancel directly from the Yelp for Business dashboard. Go to your active campaigns and click the pause or cancel icon next to each paid product.8Yelp for Business. How to Cancel Your Yelp Ads and Other Paid Products CPC advertising ends immediately when canceled and is removed from the account rather than paused. Page upgrades and other paid products end at midnight on the day you cancel them.
If you’re in a term contract, the dashboard won’t let you cancel. You have to call Yelp’s Customer Success team at (855) 380-9357.9Yelp for Business. How Do I Cancel My Yelp Advertising Program Term contracts require payment for the full commitment period listed on your purchase order. Before signing any Yelp agreement, check for a commitment period; that clause is the difference between a thirty-second online cancellation and months of charges you can’t stop.
Canceling paid services doesn’t remove your free business listing or your reviews. You can still log in, read messages, and respond.
Requesting a Refund or Disputing the Charge
Start with Yelp directly. Submit a refund request through the support center with the transaction date and invoice number from your billing history. Yelp’s general support line is (877) 767-9357, Monday through Friday. Yelp reviews disputes case by case and doesn’t publish a timeline or guarantee a refund.
If Yelp denies the refund or doesn’t respond, file a chargeback with your card issuer. Federal law gives you at least 60 days from the statement date to dispute a charge, and many banks extend that to 120 days. Send the dispute in writing to the billing-inquiry address the issuer designates, not the general payment address. Include your cancellation confirmation, any correspondence with Yelp, and the relevant statements. Chargebacks are adversarial: Yelp can contest the reversal, and if the bank sides with Yelp, the charge returns to your account.
FTC Protections for Recurring Charges
The FTC’s amended Negative Option Rule, often called the Click-to-Cancel rule, covers business-to-business subscriptions as well as consumer ones. A company enrolling you in a recurring charge has to clearly disclose the material terms up front: how much, how often, and when a free trial or promotional credit ends. Cancellation must be at least as easy as signup, so if you enrolled online, the company can’t force you to a phone line to get out.10Federal Trade Commission. Click to Cancel – The FTC’s Amended Negative Option Rule and What It Means for Your Business
This is directly relevant to the most common Yelp billing complaint: promotional credits that quietly convert into paid subscriptions. If the conversion wasn’t clearly disclosed, or if canceling was harder than signing up, that’s the scenario the rule is aimed at. You can file a complaint at ftc.gov/complaint.
Tax Treatment of Legitimate Yelp Charges
If the charge is real and yours, Yelp advertising and subscription costs are generally deductible as ordinary and necessary business expenses.11Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 26 USC 162 – Trade or Business Expenses That covers CPC ad spend, page upgrades, Guest Manager, and other Yelp products used to promote or operate the business. Sole proprietors report advertising on Line 8 of Schedule C; partnerships and corporations use the equivalent line on their returns. Keep the Yelp invoices from your billing page alongside the matching bank statements. If the IRS questions the deduction, you’ll need both to show the expense was real and business-related.