Not just them...lots of others. It’s best to simply change credit card numbers every year...they you don’t have to worry.
Well, whatever you do never subscribe to Reader’s Digest. You can call and scream and threaten but they will never unsubscribe you and they will continue to charge your card.
There are many many companies besides Classmates.com that do automatic renewals. The real key is how difficult is it to cancel?
If there isn’t a cancel button easily available that I can just click and they force you to call “customer service” then I don’t do business with that company.
Think it was stamps.com (btw waste of money unless you ship A LOT) I had to go through the call rep, his supervisor, and then his supervisor in order to get them to cancel.
Most all of my classmates that were at my 30th HS reunion.. are all on FACEBOOK or Myspace.. and they’re a lot cheaper.
I guess that’s one of the reasons I never joined Classmates.
They keep sending me notes that so-and-so has just sent me a message, but I have to join in order to see it.
I agree .. at this age who cares.
One way around this is to cancel your subscription after you get it. They still bill you for the year and let you know that you have time on it, but they will cancel it after the full year without billing you again.
I hope I explained it clearly. If not email me and I’ll write it in more detail on how I did it.
Goodluck
Thankfully, I have never sent them any money and I certainly am not going to give them or anyone else a credit card number with permission to charge me whenever they felt like it. I still get stuff from them with teasers that you have to pay to see who has the possible hots for you from 40 years ago but I don’t bite.
Almost everybody that takes your credit card for a subscription to service has automatic renewal. It’s convenient for the people that want to stay and a money maker for the ones that don’t dot their i’s when they want to leave.
Automatic renewals are a big scam.
I remember legislation being passed in Australia and India to declare the devious practice, illegal.
Yep, this trend is definitely one of my pet peeves. You pay for a magazine subscription, purchase something online or subscribe to a website, but don’t realize that you are agreeing to allow them to renew it for the rest of your natural life. Then when you realize it, they never make it easy to cancel and get a refund, you have to call some obscure number and put up with the hard sell. Being the good conservative I am, I normally don’t support government regulation. But lets just say I wouldn’t be terribly upset if they required these companies to provide a clearly labeled “opt in” option for auto-renewal and a simple online “no questions asked” method of cancelling auto-renewels.
Hopefully a class action suit that causes bankruptcy will be in their near future.
Consumer Reports does the same thing.
If you subscribe to their online access, you have to agree to an automatic renewal. I specifically called them right after my initial subscription, since there was no way to subscribe, without also agreeing to the automated renewals — told them that I am subscribing, but I do not want automatic renewals, but after a year, they did it anyway.
On my print edition, I subscribed for a year, on the website in my profile for the print edition, I checked and it said no automatic renewals, and they did it anyway.
I called and they eventually reversed it and canceled my subscription.
But I was pretty upset that even Consumer Reports does this — it’s not just that they do automatic renewal, but they did it even after you specifically instruct them NOT to do it.
A third of my class is on Facebook anyway.
I was given the option to set it up to automatically renew or not. I opted not to and I had no problem when my year was up.
I think it’s a legit practice but I think it’s only fair if the company sends a communication they are about to bill you. MLB did that but I previous I worked for did it primarily as a means to make revenue on users like yourself.
Many businesses have discovered that selling subscription services (internet, print, or otherwise) with automatic renewal provides a virtually guarenteed cash flow stream.
I no longer subscribe to any product or service that has automatic renewals. It’s a devious and reprehensible business practice. It’s also a good way to permanently alienate your customers.
You were switched to General Forum I wanted to thank you I just deleted my card so they will not beable to renew automaticly I might be bump off of this site but that is alright.
I ‘joined for free’. Since I didn’t upgrade my account, I wasn’t allowed to contact other people on my class roster though. They did, however, send me auto emails. They left my name, ‘Nikita Khrushchev’, on my class roster for months,lol.