Google’s ‘unfair and tyrannical mentality’ towards my Irish micro-business ‘is not acceptable’ – The Irish Times

“I promise to keep this email as concise and to the point as possible, but this would be a good time for you to have a tea or coffee handy,” begins an ominous email from a reader named Melanie Hunter.

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

Melaine has been writing poems and rhymes about and for others for over 20 years. She has written traditional and rhyming speeches for every major life event, such as weddings, special birthdays, retirements, funerals and more.

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

“He knew that writing had been a long-time hobby of mine; he suggested I take it more seriously.”

With the tread depth on Melanie’s running shoes being “probably below the legal limit after walking the streets for hours” – remember all that walking we had to do when we weren’t allowed to go more than 2km from our front door? – “curiosity got the better of me and, to cut a very long story short to a third party, I hired a fairly cheap web designer based in New York and started my business InStanza.”

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

“It became apparent pretty 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 party, but they didn’t like the idea of ​​reading it out loud. So with my new sneakers, I went back to the drawing board and came up with an instaframe.”

And what is it? Well, it’s a “professionally mounted and framed rhymed text that is a gift for life.”

At this point, you might be wondering why Melanie contacted Pricewatch when everything seems to be in order. But this is where her story starts to go off the rails.

She says that to add the concept of instaframes to her websites, she had to buy an e-commerce site and pay a developer to redo everything.

It wasn’t a picnic, she says. “It took two months longer than expected and, frankly, it was a painful exercise, comparable to being stung by a jellyfish,” she says.

But she did. Her developers created a Google Business account, listed the company in several online directories, and got Melanie up and running, for a large initial investment and a hefty monthly fee of $130.

“The site had been live for about 5 and a half minutes when the web designers emailed me to say I needed to submit a video to Google to verify me and my business. I could only do this by using my mobile phone and clicking on a link sent by Google. There was no option to pre-record and upload,” Melanie continues.

“Apparently Google looks for this when businesses sell online, which I understand, but here’s what happened next.

“The video was supposed to show the address where my business is registered, which is my home address, Greystones. My website, however, has the address of my husband’s office in town, simply because I don’t want strangers to know where I live. It’s not unusual. Google didn’t seem to like that.”

She explains that for the verification video, Google wanted her to “stand in front of my house like an idiot and film the street where I live. I had to show the road from top to bottom and point out the street sign.”

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

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

She also had to have the company’s registration documents on film as well as a printed bank statement.

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The video included frames of business cards and Instagram frames she hoped to sell, as well as photos of her driver’s license and passport. “All I needed was to send them pictures of me as a baby,” she wrote.

Pricewatch doesn’t know much about this, but it sounds like something that would drive us to the brink of despair.

But for Melanie, the despair was only just beginning.

“After the video was done, I went to upload it. And guess what? It failed and Google sent me a casual message saying something like ‘try again.’ I nearly lost my eyes, I was rolling my eyes so much,” she says.

“I tried again. Same thing. And again. Same thing. And again. And so on.”

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

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“Three weeks later, I got an email saying my verification had failed and I had to try again. I was about to get linked and I was also starting to feel pretty stressed. I couldn’t promote the new site because it wasn’t verified. I couldn’t do Google ads because it wasn’t verified, and I couldn’t do Instagram ads because I didn’t want people to come back to the site and see that it wasn’t verified,” Melanie explains.

When she tried calling Google, she managed to get through to a few people on their support team, but the best they could do in terms of support was to suggest sending her the same link to remake the video.

She persisted and managed to establish that the wrong landline number had been inserted into her site by the developers and Google didn’t like that.

She hired an expert who fixed some of the problems but then “with fear in his voice, kindly told me I had to make another flashing video, and he sent me the link.”

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

In June, Google accepted the video again and told her it would be returned within 10 business days. On the 11th day, she contacted Pricewatch.

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

“As an Irish micro business, this pushy and bullying mentality is not acceptable in my opinion. I feel that my business is being treated unfairly despite complying with all the verification requirements. It seems that small businesses like mine are being discriminated against in favour of larger competitors,” says Melanie.

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

Melanie notes that she has received “inconsistent feedback” on her multiple requests to audit her small business, with “the continued obstruction and audit process having a serious impact on the operations and growth of my business.”

In fact, all she was looking for was the company’s help to start her business.

She points out all the shady things that happen online and says she “sells poetry and speeches from my kitchen table and I can’t get verified. There’s something very strange about this photo, and I’m in the middle of it all like the Mona Lisa sitting still!”

But maybe not with an ironic smile.

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

We’ve never dealt with Google on this page before, and we approached the tech giant with some trepidation.

But, to her credit, she took our reader’s story very seriously and although the company declined to comment on the matter a few days after we spoke, we did hear back from Melanie.

“It feels like Christmas Day here as I sit at my kitchen table,” her second email began. “I’m about to start writing two rhyming wedding speeches and thought I’d take a quick look at my Google account. And guess what? The little blue check mark I’ve been waiting for since February is finally here. I’m verified; I repeat, I’m verified. I’m so relieved, the days of walking down my driveway and filming myself opening my front door are behind me.”