Brand added as location to existing venue

[Niecieden]

A retail brand has been added to an existing venue - my local garden centre - and has now become the default location instead of the garden centre itself, which has been established for 25 years. It now shows up in my timeline as the brand instead of the garden centre whenever I visit. The brand is one of many that are stocked within the garden centre and it seems inappropriate for this to be added in. Imagine if this were to happen within a department store, John Lewis for example. Whenever you visited the department store, it would then show up as you having visited Microsoft instead. Haven't any evidence to think that this is the work of spammers. 

I have tried to report this error many times but there is no facility for me to explain why this listing is wrong, I can only use 'duplicate' or 'doesn't exist' and so it gets rejected. Is there any way around this?

[Flash]

Hello,

It dose sound like this is inappropriate.  Please provide a link to the feature and it's GPS coordinates (as the first link will change as editing occurs) for us to be able to advise you further.

Should it be too close to your home and thus you don't want to post due to privacy reasons, you can PM me the information.  You would need to let me know here that you've done so as I get too many unsolicited PMs.  I would continue the conversation here but not reveal anything that might be identifying.

[Niecieden]

Hi Flash

My apologies for not replying to your email much sooner.  I'll send you the details in a PM.

With thanks

Denise

[Flash · Accepted solution]

And I'm sorry that I haven't had time to reply here, but to let you know I did look at your issue right away.  There was actually two different offending POIs (in addition to the correct POI for the garden centre), and looking into each what I found was that they were for online businesses.  One, for example, was for an online BBQ store.  Both websites seem to be run by the garden centre, thus why they positioned the POIs there; but there is a rule that online only businesses are not permitted on the map.  I thus deleted one and queued the other for deletion, but then talked to @Keith A as he is a Maps/Map Maker TC from the UK who thus has even higher trust than myself in your region.  He was able to delete the second POI.

There is always the possibility that they garden centre will protest these removals to GMB.  An alert employee will realize these are not permitted on the map and that any claim of "but we also sell BBQs here" is covered by the garden centre POI (there is no invite to visit to get a BBQ on the website); but mistakes can be made.  If these reappear please post here again and we'll escalate the issue.

[Niecieden]

Thanks Flash. I thought it may take a bit of time to unravel what was behind this, so no worries about how long it took to reply.

What an interesting discovery! It makes sense as these brands are promoted and advertised heavily by the garden centre and are afforded a lot of floor space within the building, and maybe they receive some sort of sponsorship from them. It just seems inappropriate as it would be chaos if all retail outlets used this method to promote the brands that they stock.

Thank you for all the time that you've put into resolving this issue, is much appreciated. A good and fair result.