SAF members, including Allen’s Flowers & Plants in San Diego, reported the appearance of unwanted third-party links to Postmates.com ahead of Valentine’s Day. At press time, many of those links, including the one posted to Allen’s Google Listing, had been removed.
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.”
Nic Faitos, senior partner at Starbright Floral Design in New York City, also reported the Postmates link had been removed — and had not reappeared. Faitos reached out to Postmates through a number of channels last week, including via email and some strongly worded complaints on Twitter, and shared his approach with other SAF members.
“The link is completely gone,” he confirmed this week. “ did come true to their word on all fronts.”
But frustrations remain. Like Bowles, Faitos was initially told that removing the link could take a long time — in Faitos’ case, “months” — but then it disappeared within days. “I think that either had more control over the link than they led us to believe or they took my tone on Twitter seriously. Who knows?”
SAF has yet to receive comment from the FTC or a direct response from either Google or Postmates, said Kate Penn, the association’s CEO.
Penn said the timing of the links’ appearance, so close to the industry’s biggest holiday, and the burdensome, convoluted process required to request their removal remain a concern for SAF — and a priority. SAF is also concerned that the issue could reemerge around other popular floral holidays, including Mother’s Day, and Penn advised florists in communication with Postmates and Google to be clear that they do not want to see the unauthorized links in the future either. She added that SAF’s own outreach is ongoing.
“We are continuing to work with the FTC as well as our channels at Google to get this issue resolved, and we will keep our members posted,” she said.
In the meantime, SAF members can report any unwanted third-party links to Kimberly Hay, SAF’s member specialist, at khay@safnow.org.
Mary Westbrook is the editor in chief of Floral Management.
