'Free trials' are costing Americans a fortune

[Elderberry]

Yahoo Finance by Cortney Moore 11/3/2019

Nothing in life is free, right? But companies continue to market trials as such to wrangle in curious customers.

It seems simple enough, but those free trial promotions usually mean entering a credit or debit card number in exchange for a service. This is convenient if you actually enjoy the service and plan on using it again in the future, but a number of Americans get trapped and lose money to auto-renewing subscriptions when these trials expire.

Ted Rossman, industry analyst for consumer financial service company Bankrate, told FOX Business, "Nearly 6 in 10 U.S. adults who signed up for a free trial were later charged against their will."

The figure comes straight from Bankrate's 2019 online shopping survey last week. It also found that 64 percent of American card holders allow their financial information to be saved when making purchases, despite nearly half of respondents believing it is unsafe to do so.

In the case of free trials, failing to remove a card number or a linked payment account ensures a business has access to your funds.

"Some dishonest businesses make it tough to cancel, hiding the terms and conditions of their offers in teensy type, using pre-checked sign-up boxes as the default setting online, and putting conditions on returns and cancellations that are so strict it could be next to impossible to stop the deliveries and the billing," the Federal Trade Commission warns consumers on its website.

More: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apos-free-trials-apos-costing-142606197.html

[Smokin Joe]

Why I don't sign up for free trials.

Why I don't like a subscription type order, and have not ordered products I would like to purchase because their website would not simply allow a single, one time purchase, to either check the product out or because I simply don't need as much as they want to send me.

[goatprairie]

I remember back in the sixties when the big record companies offered all these supposedly great deals through their record clubs.  Buy ten records for a dollar or something like that to suck you in.
I never did sign up for those deals even though fifty years ago there was a lot more music available that I liked. I didn't like the idea of being obligated to keep purchasing records even if there wasn't anything I liked.
Good thing I didn't, because after the sixties ended, what I considered good music started drying up.
I don't think there's been one recording in the last twenty years by the so-called big name artists that I would want.

[Polly Ticks]

I remember back in the sixties when the big record companies offered all these supposedly great deals through their record clubs.  Buy ten records for a dollar or something like that to suck you in.
I never did sign up for those deals even though fifty years ago there was a lot more music available that I liked. I didn't like the idea of being obligated to keep purchasing records even if there wasn't anything I liked.
Good thing I didn't, because after the sixties ended, what I considered good music started drying up.
I don't think there's been one recording in the last twenty years by the so-called big name artists that I would want.

[goatprairie]

Thanks...interesting.  I was always tempted, but never bought into those things. I knew friends who did.