Recently, I went through the process of verifying my Play Developer account for my Croatian-based company, a d.o.o. (limited liability company). If you’re in a similar situation, you might find the steps I followed useful. Google provides a detailed guide on how to complete this process, which you can find here. However, I wanted to share my personal experience, including some practical tips to make your verification smoother.
Obtaining a D-U-N-S Number
D-U-N-S is a unique number, used worldwide to identify and access information on businesses. Obtaining D-U-N-S is free and I got it in one week. Same number is used when verifying for the Apple Developer Program.
My steps, how I remember them (it was a year ago so bear with me):
- Visit the D-U-N-S Registration page.
- Choose the right option: Since I was verifying for the Apple Dev Program before Play, I selected “I’m an Apple developer”.
- Option for Apple developer redirects to https://developer.apple.com/support/D-U-N-S/ where I selected email D&B (bottom of the page).
- Contact D&B: Filled my email address and followed the steps.
I wish I could remember the steps in more detail, but here’s what I know:
Full Legal Business name – Your full company name (the name on your registration documents).
DBA / Tradestyle – “DBA” stands for “Doing Business As.” It refers to any other name your business is known by or operates under, other than its legal name. This is also known as a tradestyle.
Business Structure / Legal structure – Is your company an LLC, a corporation?
Home-based business – is your company address same as your residential address?
Standard Industrial Classification – I used 7371 since my company offers Computer Programming services.
North American Industry Classification – I used 541511 code for Custom Computer Programming Services.
At some point, form will ask you to provide a document that verifies your full company name and address. And then you wait for confirmation. After about a week I received an email “Your D&B D-U-N-S Number has been created” containing my d-u-n-s number.
Personal Identification Verification
To pass this step you need a legal representative of your company: whose name is on official company documents? In my case it’s simple, it’s me.
You’ll have to upload a scan of your id card, back and front. I think I had issues with backend not recognizing my scan, and issue was with png format. Try to save your scan as jpg if you’ll have issues.
Company Identification Verification
This step took a month for me, primarily because I was a bit careless when submitting the requested documents. The good news is that Google support is responsive and helpful—you’ll even get a real person to assist you. If it was AI assisting me, I don’t care, she was nice.
But be aware that if you make a mistake in submitting the correct documents, your verification process could be delayed, as they will place you back in the queue. The extended verification time was entirely my fault, but I’m sharing this to emphasize: read this step carefully and double-check everything.
Long story short: If I had just sent them a proper scan of the official company registration document from the start, I could have passed this step in a day.
How to fill the tax info for a non US company
If you intend to sell your app or put ads in your app, you will need to fill in the google payments profile.
You’ll need to fill in the tax info. Google payments tax form doesn’t allow dots in the name or anything other than a-z, A-Z, 0-9, hyphen(-) and ampersand(&). Just put the name you would put without the unsupported characters. E.g. if it’s My company d.o.o., then it’s My company doo. I wrote about how to fill the W-8BEN-E form, check it out.