Questions, answered honestly

Why doesn't OhLocal send SMS?

Because in the US, business texting now runs through A2P 10DLC registration — and it is registered per business, not per platform. Every individual café or salon would need to be registered as a brand with an approved campaign before its first text could send. That means registration fees passed on to you and, typically, a one to two week approval lag between signing up and sending anything. Unregistered traffic gets filtered by the carriers anyway.

More fundamentally: SMS requires a phone number, and a phone number is exactly the record a walk-in customer doesn’t leave. Our QR code and short link work with no phone number at all — the customer scans, taps, and is on the real review form. That covers the customers no SMS tool can reach.

We may revisit SMS later for businesses that do hold phone numbers (booked appointments, for example). It is a deliberate sequencing choice, not a blind spot.

Why do you never send my customers to Yelp?

Because Yelp prohibits all review solicitation — their policy bans “any action taken to prompt, encourage, or request a review.” Not just incentivized asks: any ask. A tool that routes your customers to your Yelp page is soliciting reviews on your behalf, and the penalty lands on you, not the tool — a public Consumer Alert banner on your Yelp listing that every prospective customer sees.

So we monitor Yelp — you see your Yelp reviews in your dashboard — but we will never put a Yelp button in front of a customer. Any tool that offers one is gambling with your listing.

Why not pre-fill the review text to make it easier?

Because Google deletes templated reviews and penalizes the patterns behind them. Google removed roughly 292 million policy-violating reviews in 2025 alone, and its detection specifically hunts repeated, templated content across many profiles. Pre-filled text produces exactly that signature: the same phrasing showing up across every business using the same tool. The reviews get removed, and the pattern flags every profile attached to it.

A review in your customer’s own words is the only kind that survives — and the only kind worth having. Our link opens the real, empty Google review form. What your customer writes is up to them.

Why is there no star-rating filter before the review link?

That pattern — ask for a rating first, send happy customers to Google and unhappy ones to a private form — is called review gating, and it is explicitly banned. Google’s policy prohibits selectively soliciting positive reviews, and the FTC’s rule on consumer reviews (in effect since October 2024) makes review suppression a violation carrying civil penalties of roughly $53,000 per violation. Fashion Nova paid $4.2 million for suppressing sub-four-star reviews.

Tools that ship this feature expose every business that uses it — and enforcement finds tool users easily, because the tool leaves the same fingerprint on every profile. We protect you by not building it. Every customer sees the same links in the same order, whatever their experience was. A private feedback option exists alongside the public links — alongside, never as a gate in front of them.

Will more reviews get me stars in my Google ads (Seller Ratings)?

No — and anyone selling you “stars in your ads” for a salon, café, or clinic is selling you the wrong machinery. Google Seller Ratings are the stars under Shopping and search ads, and they are built for ecommerce: they aggregate ratings of online stores from ecommerce review platforms. A local walk-in business is not eligible for them, no matter how many reviews it collects.

What local reviews actually move is your Business Profile: your rating on Google Maps, your position in the local pack, and what a searcher sees before choosing you over the shop down the street. That is worth far more to a walk-in business than ad stars ever would be — and it is what we build toward.

Is my customer list really mine?

Yes. Viewing and exporting your contacts is free on every tier, including the free one, forever. We never blur, cap, or paywall your list, and cancelling doesn’t hold it hostage — export it any time. Plenty of tools treat your customer list as their retention lever. We think a list you can’t take with you was never yours, and we’d rather you stay because the product earns it.

What happens to my printed QR codes if I cancel?

They keep working — the short links behind your printed cards, table tents, and receipt lines resolve forever, on every tier and after cancellation. Your customers will never scan a code you paid to print and hit a dead page. Reprinting collateral is a real cost for a small business, and we won’t make our billing your printing problem.