So a question is, what's the tradeoff between transparency & making it easy for the customer to cancel at any time, versus locking them in? Lots of businesses make money off of customer inertia where the easy path is to keep paying. Netflix, Tivo, your cable service, phone service, could all plausibly have much worse retention rates if they actively asked you each month if you want to continue paying. Additionally, my cable company certainly isn't going to tell me when my one-year promotional rate is expired and my rate suddenly doubles. Does that make cable service a scam?
Beyond that, you are labeling the business a "scam" because you assert they are hiding the recurring payments from their users. Maybe so, but it would help to have data, rather than "wondering" how many users were unaware of the payments. When they become aware, does the company refund their money? Do they a/b test their signup process to optimize signups versus the later cancellation rate? I would certainly expect they do, and that they have a pretty specific idea of what their dissatistfied customer rate is, what the acceptable (non-zero) rate is for them, and how to avoid skyrocketing it while increasing their signups.
It's not a pretty business on those terms, but it's real, and plays on human behavior, both positive -- people like to receive new stuff in the mail every month, it's an addictive cycle for many -- and negative -- people sign up for stuff online without reading the fine print, or bothering to check their credit card statements.
You've posted this comment three times, and I won't reply on every thread, but let's be clear: these "review" sites are shady operations that extort retailers by aggregating negative reviews and charging to hide them.
You can Google a lot of e-commerce sites with the word "fraud" or "scam" and find a lot of negative stuff. This is the internet.
I don't dispute the fact that there are probably several hundred unhappy customers, as reported the site will do >$100M in revenue and everything costs $40 or less, with 2.5MM+ transactions, it's inevitable, but it's not indicative of a problem.
Question: Would you be opposed to a pop-up window which, when the user clicks the pink checkout button, comes onto the screen specifically explaining the subscription program?
I have no doubt it would hugely reduce JustFab's profits.
Dark patterns are bullshit, and your defense of this company is a classic case of cognitive dissonance at work. You don't consider yourself a bad person, so when confronted with obvious evidence of a company you invested in being a scamming piece of shit, you try to find a way to make the company not a scamming piece of shit. In your mind, this may be true. But the rest of us aren't sharing in your delusion.
The world is full of rich people with compromised morals. Please don't be one of them.
That's true, but that doesn't mean that JustFab's businessmethods are not a scam. See the discussion above about not including the Vip-membership in the checkout-flow.
Let's stick to sound reasoning here. Whatever problems JustFab may have, since consumeraffairs ranks amazon at 1 star and 1saleaday at 4 stars, its ratings have no bearing whatsoever on actual consumer satisfaction with JustFab.
> I don't dispute the fact that there are probably several hundred unhappy customers
You're being disingenuous. You know full well that the 409 1-star complaints filed with consumeraffairs.com are just from people who were motivated enough to file a complaint with that particular site. They are therefore the tip of the iceberg.
They also exclude the quite probably substantial number of exploited customers who don't check their credit card statements every month and therefore are completely unaware that they are paying your company $39 every month. Like for example the subject of the original post.
You know all this FULL WELL, don't you.
This "business" model is designed to ferret out exactly those kinds of people and exploit their lack of attention to fine print and oversight of their credit card activity. It's illegal in Germany, which is why your company had to change its checkout UI to be more clear.. but only in Germany.
This makes me think Matrix Partners has been reduced to a bunch of desperate slimeballs. Guess the days of funding companies like Apple are long gone.
Regardless of what you believe about JustFab, it has to mean something to you that just about everyone commenting about this on Hacker News disagrees with you.
The salient difference between JustFab and any other "of the month" club is that you don't actually get anything every month. You get a JustFab fun buck that is only usable on their site and they go to great lengths to hide that you're suddenly buying those. In a "__ of the month" club, you get a physical thing dropped on your doorstep every month that reminds you of the recurring billing relationship.
In my opinion, JustFab deliberately deceptively does not give you anything to remind you of the price you are paying and therefore is a scam.
When I sign up for TV service, Cable service, or Internet service I'm aware I'm signing up for a service. I wasn't made to believe that I was making a one time purchase, and being sucked into a service I didn't want or was aware I was signing up for. I presumably am aware I have cable and internet.
Nobody is criticizing them for not asking every month if they want to continue. They are criticizing them for tricking users into signing up for something they didn't want and didn't know they were signing up for!
This is an analogous situation. I walk into H&M and see some boots for a good price, and they have said they now only take credit card. Ok, no prob. I sign the credit card receipt and walk out the door. A few months later I notice H&M has been charging me $40 a month every month. I go back there and ask what's up with that? They say, well when you bought those boots, you signed up for our store club, you signed the credit card receipt saying you were signing up! You should have known, it was printed on the receipt! Signing a credit card receipt is part of a normal checkout worflow, and 90% of customers aren't going to notice if there is a subscription printed on there as well.
The point is, the store is set up to be a normal online store, and seems to go out of the way to hide that it is a subscription service.
> Beyond that, you are labeling the business a "scam" because you assert they are hiding the recurring payments from their users. Maybe so, but it would help to have data, rather than "wondering" how many users were unaware of the payments. When they become aware, does the company refund their money?
I think the class action lawsuit might satisfy your curiosity.
The customer they're trying to acquire is the kind that doesn't check their credit card statement in detail every month. So A/B testing cancellation rates and customer satisfaction levels are all mostly irrelevant.
Their lifeblood is the zombie customer who is completely unaware they've got a leech sucking at their credit card account.
http://www.justfab.com/how-justfab-works.htm
They have 2 million likes on Facebook. Were all these users scammed?
The "monthly subscription" has recently been a hot e-commerce category. Other sites with a similar model are shoedazzle.com, fabkids.com, musthave.popsugar.com and so on. See: http://www.quora.com/E-Commerce/What-are-the-most-interestin...
So a question is, what's the tradeoff between transparency & making it easy for the customer to cancel at any time, versus locking them in? Lots of businesses make money off of customer inertia where the easy path is to keep paying. Netflix, Tivo, your cable service, phone service, could all plausibly have much worse retention rates if they actively asked you each month if you want to continue paying. Additionally, my cable company certainly isn't going to tell me when my one-year promotional rate is expired and my rate suddenly doubles. Does that make cable service a scam?
Beyond that, you are labeling the business a "scam" because you assert they are hiding the recurring payments from their users. Maybe so, but it would help to have data, rather than "wondering" how many users were unaware of the payments. When they become aware, does the company refund their money? Do they a/b test their signup process to optimize signups versus the later cancellation rate? I would certainly expect they do, and that they have a pretty specific idea of what their dissatistfied customer rate is, what the acceptable (non-zero) rate is for them, and how to avoid skyrocketing it while increasing their signups.
It's not a pretty business on those terms, but it's real, and plays on human behavior, both positive -- people like to receive new stuff in the mail every month, it's an addictive cycle for many -- and negative -- people sign up for stuff online without reading the fine print, or bothering to check their credit card statements.