A number of Society of American Florists retailer members reported this week that links to Postmates.com that appeared on their Google Listings ahead of Valentine’s Day have now disappeared.
The unauthorized links to the third-party courier caused concern for many florists during one of their busiest weeks — and led SAF to reach out directly to Google, Postmates and the Federal Trade Commission, and to help florists navigate the opaque process for successfully removing the links from their pages.
Sam Bowles, general manager and creative director at Allen’s Flowers & Plants in San Diego, was among the retail florists who initially brought the issue to SAF’s attention earlier this month. He and his team spent more than an hour on the phone with Google support personnel last week trying to remove the Postmates link, in addition to submitting requests electronically. The Google rep advised Bowles it could take two weeks to remove the link — but as of Feb. 18, it was no longer present on the business listing.
“It is gone, but…I received no message from Google letting me know they’d removed it, even though I am in an active support ticket,” Bowles said. “I just kept asking for it to be escalated to someone who could actually help.”
Read more at the Society of American Florists (Mary Westbrook)