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The Future of Shopping: Trapping You in a Club You Didn't Know You Joined (bloomberg.com)
Just a word of caution: the next time you spot a great deal on a shopping portal, you will want to carefully look for all the radio buttons, and tick boxes -- and perhaps also skim through the ToS -- before placing the order. Bloomberg has an in-depth piece on the ordeal of a customer who purchased a lingerie item from an e-commerce website called Adore Me. Little did the customer know that the $19.95 she was spending to purchase a piece of cloth would end up costing her -- partly because of her own ignorance -- more than $300. Adore Me, you see, maintains a subscription model in which it charges users a fee of around $40 a month, even if they don't purchase anything. It might surprise many, but Adore Me isn't the only shopping portal or service that runs this sort of tactic. "It's the new thing," says Francisca Allen, the deputy district attorney of California's Santa Clara County. "There's thousands and thousands of companies that do this." What's more, these companies have made it frustratingly difficult to cancel these subscriptions -- it often requires you to sit through a one-hour call to the customer representative and listening to a bunch of funky songs that you suddenly don't adore as much. Bloomberg reports:Hundreds of customer complaints against Adore Me and other subscription e-commerce businesses are stacking up at the Federal Trade Commission, according to records obtained by Bloomberg. They follow a pattern: Shoppers believe they've been tricked into signing up for recurring credit card charges, often for a relatively small amount that can be easily overlooked in a monthly bill. Then companies make it an exasperating hassle to quit and get a refund.
Here is THE ANSWER. Use Paypal.
First, you won't be giving your credit card info to gawd knows who. It can be literally anyone from a group of criminals in Russia to psycho teens in Brazil to douche companies described in the article. If a 'company' does not have the wherewithal and ability to get setup to take Paypal, do you really want to give them your credit card anyway? If they don't take Paypal, I consider the company incompetent or scam artists.
If you still somehow get on some recurring plan through Paypal, that is registered with Paypal as an actively recurring charge, you can go to Paypal and simply change the status of that account to inactive. Done. Paypal will no longer payout to them.
I've done this myself with so-called companies that refuse to stop billing me. I check the list at least once a month. it has saved my tones of time and money. Note, I am not affiliated with Paypal in any way and rarely recommend any business. But with online shopping, Paypal has truly worked for me.