Google’s ‘unfair, bully-ish mentality’ towards my Irish microbusiness ‘is not okay’

“I promise to keep this email as succinct and to the point as I can, but now would be a good time for you to have a tea or a coffee to hand,” begins an ominous sounding email from a reader called Melanie Hunter.

“I hope you won’t need a pillow halfway through,” she adds.

Melaine has written poems and rhymes about – and for – other people for more than 20 years. She has written traditional and rhymed speeches for every milestone event in life such as weddings, special birthdays, retirements, funerals and more.

“During one of the Covid lockdowns a gentleman I know attended a funeral where a eulogy that I had written was delivered. This gentleman made an off the cuff remark to me, that I should formalise my writing, and set up a business,” Melanie says.

“He knew that writing was a lifelong hobby of mine; he suggested that I should consider taking it more seriously.”

With the tyre thread depth on Melanie’s runners “probably below the legal limit from walking the streets for hours on end” – remember all that walking we had to do when were forbidden from straying more than 2km from our front doors? – “curiosity got the better of me and to lop a very long story down to a third, I hired a fairly inexpensive web designer who was based out of New York, and got my business InStanza up and running.”

Melanie’s idea was to provide a speech writing service, offering traditional and rhymed speeches for every celebratory occasion in life.

“It became apparent fairly quickly, that despite my fervent efforts, I wasn’t going to retire anytime soon,” she continues.

“People loved the idea of me writing something for their celebration, but they didn’t love the idea of reading it out. So, in my now new runners, I jogged on back to the drawing board, and came up with an instaframe.”

And what is that? Well, it is a “rhymed written piece, that is professionally mounted and framed, making a gift for life”.

At this point you might be wondering why Melanie contacted Pricewatch at all as everything seems to be in order. But it is at this point the wheels of her story start to come off.

She says that to add the instaframes notion to her websites she had to buy an ecommerce site and pay a developer to re-do the whole thing.

It was no craic, she says. “It took two months longer than promised and truthfully it was a painful exercise, up there with being stung by several jellyfish,” she says.

But she got there. Her developers set up a Google Business Account, listed the business on a couple of online directories and got Melanie up and running with a large upfront cost and a hefty monthly fee of €130.

“The site was live about 5½ minutes, when the web designers emailed me to say that I had to send a video to Google to verify myself and my business. I could only do it by using my mobile phone and by clicking on a link that Google had sent. There was no option to pre-record and upload,” Melanie continues.

“Apparently, Google look for this when companies are selling online which I get, but here’s what happened next.

“The video had to show the address where my business in registered, which is my home address is Greystones. My website however, has the address of my husband’s office in town, simply because I don’t want randomers knowing where I live. This is not unusual. Google didn’t seem to like it.”

She says that for the verification video Google wanted her to “stand outside my house like a plonker to film the road I live on. I had to show the road up and down and show the street sign”.

The search engine also wanted her to show her house name and number and “run to my front door while filming and open the door with my keys”.

Then she had to “go into my office and open my laptop where I showed my Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn pages, Microsoft Outlook email address”.

She also had to have company registration documents on film as well as a bank statement which was printed out.

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The video included frames of business cards and the instaframes she was hoping to sell as well as shots of her driving licence and passport. “I was only short of sending them my baby photographs,” she writes.

Pricewatch knows little of such things but this sounds like something that would drive us to the brink of despair.

But, for Melanie, the despair was only beginning.

“Once completed, I went to upload the video. And guess what? It failed, and Google sent me a flippant message saying something along the lines of ‘try again’. I nearly lost my eyeballs into the back of my head, such was the eyeroll,” she says.

“I tried again. Same thing. And again. Same thing. And again. On it went.”

Poor Melanie says that she had to re-do the video approximately 15 times and eventually Google accepted it and she was told to wait up to 10 working days for the verification process to run its course.

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“Three weeks later I got an email to say that my verification had failed and to try again. I was fit to be tied and I was also beginning to feel quite stressed. I couldn’t beat the drum about the new site because it wasn’t verified. I couldn’t take out any Google ads because it wasn’t verified, nor could I do any Instagram ads as I didn’t want people going back to the site and seeing it wasn’t verified,” Melanie says.

When she tried phoning Google she got through to a couple of people in its support team but the best they could manage by way of support was to suggest they send her the same link to re-do the video.

She kept at it and managed to establish that the wrong landline number had been put in on her site by the developers and Google didn’t like this.

She hired an expert who resolved some issues but who then “with fear in his voice, broke it to me gently that I had to do another blinkin’ video, and he sent me the link”.

“He couldn’t believe that this was necessary again, so I started the same sorry nonsense and re-did the video countless times, and just like before, I lost count of how many times it took to do this,” she says.

Then, in June, Google accepted the video again and told her it would be back to her within 10 working days. On the 11th day she contacted Pricewatch.

She acknowledges that her story is long but she wanted to illustrate how difficult Google is to deal with

“As a small Irish microbusiness, this invasive and bully-ish type mentality, in my opinion is not okay. I feel that my business is experiencing unfair treatment despite my compliance with all verification requirements. It appears that small businesses like mine are being discriminated against in favour of larger competitors,” Melanie says.

She highlights the “repeated rejections of my verification video” and “a lack of transparency in the verification process, making it difficult to understand what specifically specific requirements I am failing to meet, so I feel like I am an extra in Groundhog Day”.

Melanie notes that she has been given “inconsistent feedback” on her multiple submissions to have her small business verified with the “ongoing obstruction and the verification process severely impacting my business operations and growth”.

In essence, all she was looking for was some help from the company to set up her business.

She points to all the dodgy things that happen online and says she is “selling poetry and speeches from my kitchen table and I can’t get verified. There is something very wrong with this picture, and I am in the middle of it like the Mona Lisa sitting still!”

Only not, perhaps, smiling wryly.

“I know it is David and Goliath, but the big guys can’t keep treating the smaller players like this,” Melanie says.

Now, we have never had to deal with Google on this page before, and we approached the tech giant with some trepidation.

But, to its credit, it took our reader’s story very seriously and while the company declined to comment on the record a couple of days after we intervened we heard back from Melanie.

“It feels like Christmas Day here as I sit at my kitchen table,” her second email started. “I’m about to start writing two rhymed wedding speeches and thought I’d have a quick look at my Google account. And guess what? The little blue tick I’ve been longing to see since February is finally there. I’m verified; I’ll say it again, I’m verified. I’m so relieved, the days of walking up and down my driveway filming myself as I open my front door are behind me.”