This is a very depressing post indeed. I received a letter this morning from one of my readers who was thrown out of Google Shopping for no apparent reason. He went on to tell me that Google has caused him to close down his small business and lay off 5 employees that worked their all because Google insisted that his store was part of a MLM when in fact his products were his own and not part of some bigger company. Well here is the email’s from him to Google:

Original Message Follows:
————————
From: Left Blank to Protect Users Email
Subject: Why Was I Disapproved?
Date: Mon, 04 Jan 2010 16:10:37 +0000

You guys keep disapproving my feed without any explanation as to why? I
seen in the past that you guys kept filtering my items because of
duplicate
content, is this the reason why it is now disapproved? If so I think you
guys should ban every christian bookstore in the market because we all
have
the same item descriptions. We all get these descriptions from the
manufacturer so if you are gonna ban me I feel that you should ban amazon

and christianbook.com too being as though we all have the same
descriptions!!

Reply From Google
————————
Hello,

Thank you for your message about the Google Merchant Center. This
auto-generated email is to confirm we’ve received your inquiry.

We strive to reply individually to all email within one to two business
days. We appreciate the urgent nature of your message and will respond as
soon as possible. You can also visit the Help Center at
http://www.google.com/support/merchants/?hl=en_US to find the answers to
commonly asked questions.

If you’d like to close your Google Merchant Center account, please visit
http://google.com/support/merchants/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=160541 for
information on how to do so.

If your message is unrelated to the Google Merchant Center, we may not be
able to respond to your question. Please visit the Help Center of the
Google product or service that you’re looking for at
http://www.google.com/support/?hl=en to find the answer to your question.

We look forward to responding to your Google Merchant Center inquiry.

Sincerely,

The Google Team

From Reader To Google
———————-
Date: Sun, 10 Jan 2010 23:17:57 -0500

Can you please tell me what this duplicate account happens to be? I only
have one store so this is coming as a real surprise to me. Shall I fax
over my articles of organization? I do not have any other stores nor is
this a duplicate account. I do not upload my stuff under any other name or
store. My store is it’s own entity and has it’s own products. This mishap
has also caused my sales to drop off of the map and it’s causing me to
have to possibly shut down. I went from making 10 sales a day on Google
shopping for the last year and a half to making 0 sales a day.
Please tell me what I have to do to get back into Google shopping and if
one of them things is to shut down some duplicate store I have no idea how
to do that being as though I ONLY OWN ONE STORE!!! I do not own anything
else just one store.
A lot of us Christian bookstores carry the same products, I really think
you guys just have me mixed up with someone else.
Thanks

Google’s Reply
————-
Hello,

Thank you for your email. Upon further review of your website, we noticed
that your site isn’t compliant with our Program Policies. Therefore, we’ve
disabled your Google Merchant Center account. Please be aware that you
must own any products that you submit to the Google Merchant Center and
ship these products directly to the buyer. We aren’t accepting sites which
list products sold from cataloged drop-shipping programs.

Please visit
http://google.com/support/merchants/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=160074 for
more details on our Program Policies.

Sincerely,

The Google Team

Reader’s Reply Back
——————
Date: Fri, 15 Jan 2010 04:17:54 -0500

I do own all of my products. I own a physical christian bookstore. Again
would you like store photos and my business license? We are 100% legit.
Our website is part of a network, but that is as far as it goes. They do
not supply our products, we do. What do I have to do to prove that these
are products that I own. It is really bothersome that Google makes
judgments and descisions based off of assumptions without a shred of
proof. You may see product numbers that are similar to other stores in the
network but the only reason they are the same is because it is the way the
network that I am on keeps tracks of the sales and sends the item invoices
over to me, from there I process the order and if I do not have it in
stock I re order from the manufacturer to our store and then re-ship the
item (and dont tell me that is against the policies because if that is so,
I had better not see christianbook.com in Googlebase anymore because I
used to work with them and can tell you first hand that they also do
that). This is very disheartening from my point of view. Google is single
handedly sending my store out of business. I depended on the money coming
in off of Google shopping in order to stay in business. I am now loosing
$3,000 per month and had to let 2 employees go.

I am asking you to please put my products back up. I own everything I
sell. You have no proof that these are not my products but I have all
proof that they are, I have invoices from manufacturers, a business
license and if need be pictures. Also I am operating the same way as any
other christian bookstore on Googlebase including christianbook.com and
familychristian.com. I feel that I am being discriminated against. This is
very negligible on Google’s part to take me down and not even ask for
proof. If you need proof I can supply it for you..

Google’s Reply
————-
Hello,

Thanks for taking the time to email us back. Currently, we’re unable to
accept products sold through commission or multi-level marketing programs.
This includes sellers who sell products through an affiliate marketing
relationship, sellers who drop ship orders through third-party
wholesalers, and independent distributors who sell goods offered within a
cataloged marketing program. These sellers’ content may be crawled by and
included in Google’s web search, but this content won’t be included in
Google Product Search.

Sincerely,

The Google Team

Reader’s Reply Back
——————-
Okay can someone please explain to me how this makes me any different than christianbook.com.. I do not sell my products through any other catalog, third party reseller or MLM. How many different times am I gonna have to say this I OWN ALL OF MY OWN PRODUCTS. I keep asking you guys if you want proof and you keep avoiding the question. I have spent a lot of money getting programs made so that I can imprt my stuff into Google Shopping. Are you gonna reimburse me for that? Also I have lost nearly $25,000 in the last 3 months and you are causing my small business to go bankrupt. I do expect reimbursement now.

Shall I send you invoices for the products that I own, If that is not acceptable then I think the courts will find this very acceptable. I am trying to hold back but you guys are leaving me no choice but to file suit against you. I don’t care if you are a big name, anyone can be brought down. I will also be releasing a ton of press releases on monday explaining how Google has ruined my business and sent 5 employees out of work along with forcing me to shut my doors on my brick and mortar store. I survived off of Google shopping and the reason I am not in it now is because you guys only hear what you want to hear. I have offered every thing from invoices of the products that I have ordered to pictures of the products in my shop along with pictures of my shop. If that’s not proof I don’t know what is. So be prepared for hell because I am ready to bring it to you.

————————————————————————————————————–

Google has thrived on small businesses to build Adwords into the multi billion dollar empire that it is today and now that they are on top they disregard all of the small businesses that have made them number one.

This was a truly sad letter, this man offered to send them everything from invoices to pictures of the products in his store. If this isn’t proof I don’t know what is. But it almost seems like Google is not even reading his emails because any normal business/person would have said “okay show me the proof” or if it was me and a person was willing to go through all of this I would have believed them by now. But not Google, they don’t care if this guy is going to show them solid proof they only hear what they write, it’s almost like their writing at him instead of to him.

Google is sending this man out of business and they don’t show not one little sign of remorse. They are supposedly the number one website in the world but there is no one this man can call to get in touch with to help him. Now let me ask you a question, what big company do you know that doesn’t have some type of customer service call in number? One of Google’s biggest problems have been having someone to contact in case of problems or emergencies. The only people that get to even talk to anyone at Google are their biggest advertisers and publishers because they are the only people Google cares about. They have built their company on the backs of millions of small businesses but in their eyes these businesses man nothing to them because they won’t even give them something as simple as a phone number to call in to.

Now let me ask you guys another question do you really think Google deserves our business? Without small companies supporting them they would loose 75% of their advertising dollars. While I can’t pull everyone of my clients out of Google advertising I am going to recommend other forms of PPC adverts to new clients who come on because quite frankly I don’t think Google deserves my business. This is just one of many incidents that has bothered me about Google, but this is by far the most heartbreaking incident.

Unfortunately my job requires me to work with Google but I cant wait until I see the day when I am optimizing for the next #1 search engine. In other words I cant wait for Google to fall..

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