Read the fine print. Really. And thoroughly.
Yes, I've been sucked in a few times, and even though I read a bunch before doing so, I must have missed some key lines each time. My latest oops was for great jogging clothes for cheap that were hidden under a monthly subscription blanket...
But the best example though was this thing called Julep. My blog won't be about product reviews and such, but I'll this company/product to just explain why you should read the fine print.
Saw an ad about getting free nail polish, easy, no hassle, blah blah. What's the catch. I read and read and basically you sign up for their monthly glamour box and you get your first month free. Interesting. You also get referral points if other people sign up using your code, which is worthwhile if it's a good product. This was a month before Christmas so I thought it could be neat to sign up myself and grandma and mom to get three free glamour boxes and use referral points to then get another free product. If the product was bad I would cancel all three.
I read the fine print, you can cancel your subscription anytime, or you can choose to "skip my box" if you don't like the selection of items that month. I must have stopped reading there.
I did it, signed up and my nail polish was in the mail. Then used my referral link to sign up two more people and their nail polishes were in the mail too. Then with all my referral points, I ordered what I could that would be free from the site and got a box of lip glosses and three mini lipsticks. I thought I was pretty clever.
Then the next month came and there was new fine print. You cant skip your first paid months box. What?! $24.99 a month, and you have to pay this first month after your free month.
We received the products and the colors for nail polish that month were awful. Silver, dark purple and a pink that was pretty much silver too. Colours that didn't impress my grandma or mom. I recently tried the silver as people raved about the quality and within a day it was cracked. The texture was kinda like painting my toes with white out. Yuck. Then, tried the lipsticks and the priming pen made my lips feel like they were going to fall off which didn't feel normal..
Okay, so now to do the "cancel anytime" thing. Julep does not really have any monitored emails or live chat options, so you must call. 5 phone calls over two days later I finally got through to someone who seemed to hate their job. Told them the products sucked and I needed to cancel for myself and two others. He begrudgingly said he would cancel them and I got the cancellation emails. Done, right?
I had read before I bought into the program that others have had problems after cancelling; sometimes they got charged anyways, sometimes it didn't actually cancel etc. I watched my emails. Sure enough a week later, one of the sign ups did in fact tell me my product had shipped and thanks for my business.. What?!? I called again and again and finally just emailed their generic email address from Julep. I sent them my cancellation email and told them to not ship and do not charge. They reversed the charges but told us to keep the already shipped product for free as a "sorry". (It never did show up in the mail.)
Morals of this long story?
1. Read all of the fine print you can find.
2. Google reviews about the company, about the offer, basically what everyone else is saying.
3. Call the company first to understand the offer before you pay/give a credit card.
4. After your jump in, keep doing the research on the full site. Usually there IS a way to cancel, but a lot of the time it is time sensitive.
5. If it seems too good to be true, it usually is.
Yep. Learning the hard way is always the best lesson. Great review!
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