A booking portal should not charge you to answer your own phone.

In a reality where all the big guys have everything, how can small and medium business owners get attention and drive more sales without paying the expensive and abusive fees from the bigger companies that do not understand their business, which is very niche and local?

Emilio Puente

That question is easy to assert and harder to prove, so I went and measured it. I surveyed fifty small businesses in Kobe, Japan, and built sites for fifteen of them. These numbers come from that survey.

• 4

  Shops listed with a phone number that bills them per call

  The number on their listing belongs to a booking portal, not to the shop. The portal forwards the call and charges the owner for it. A customer who has already decided to visit still costs the shop money to answer.

• 12

  Of fifteen had no website of their own

  Their entire presence online was a listing on a platform they do not control, cannot edit freely, and do not own. If the platform changes its terms, the business has no fallback.

• 38

  Prices on one bar's menu that Google cannot read

  The whole drink menu renders only in JavaScript, so search engines see an empty page asking them to enable it. The bar had opened six weeks earlier and was already invisible for every dish and price it sells.

• 7

  Of nine Instagram handles on record were wrong or dead

  One pointed at an unrelated account posting spam. Owners are often listed under a handle that no longer exists, and nobody tells them. Two businesses in the wider survey had a website whose domain has since expired, and a portal still sends customers to the dead address.