Yelp has increasingly been integrating transaction and commerce capabilities into its site. It started long ago with OpenTable and more broadly moved to food ordering and appointment scheduling in 2013.
Earlier today the company announced hotel and (of all things) winery booking through new third party relationships. Hotel bookings come courtesy of Hipmunk and winery reservations come through CellarPass.
In addition to these two Yelp has relationships with a range of other booking services: delivery.com, Eat24, Booker, EatStreet, ChowNow and Ordr.in. The company also purchased restaurant reservations service SeatMe in 2013. This push is part of the broader Yelp Platform initiative.
Yelp says that its booking capabilities encompass 28,000 business locations and that 50 percent of bookings happen in its mobile app:
Approximately 28,000 businesses in all major US markets are available for booking on Yelp Platform today and we’ll continue to roll out more in the coming months. With approximately 250,000 transactions happening through Yelp Platform in Q3 2014 (and more than 50% of those on mobile), it’s clear Yelpers love the convenience of booking and purchase options within Yelp.
So far Yelp doesn’t charge businesses anything directly for access to the transactional capabilities, although the third party services do and Yelp gets a revenue share. However it’s only a matter of time before Yelp integrates payments (Apple Pay) capabilities to become a full-fledged e-commerce platform for travel and local services.
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