I was going to say OP's (your) girlfriend went through this 8 months ago, which probably meant a completely different looking checkout page. We all know startups are constantly trying different things in their UI to increase conversion.
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.
If you look at the edit history of JustFab wiki page, you'll see most of the stuff related to their shady business practice was added after last year's discussion [3]
The credit card was issued by China Construction Bank. China's financial & banking system is not as advanced as the US, many Chinese people don't use online banking at all.
Her father was the main card holder, and she was using the second card, her father paid the bills every month as soon as he received the paper statement, he didn't notice anything suspicious.
Some people asked why it took her 8 months to find out [3]: she was studying for her Master degree in the US, didn't have a SSN, was using a credit card issued by a bank in her home country, her father paid the bill for her at home and didn't notice anything unusual until she finished her study and came home to look at the credit card bills.
My girlfriend was studying in the US at the time, she didn't have a SSN, she was using a visa card issued by the china construction bank, her father paid the bill every month and didn't notice anything unusual. She finished her study and returned back to China last month, only then did she find out the $39.95 charge for the last eight months. Basically JustFab robbed her $320 for nothing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6455391