It kept me wonder why a company with very questionable (I will try to avoid using the word "fraudulent") business model was able to raise big money. Didn't the VCs have to do the due diligence?
I didn't have any direct experience with JustFab. The victim was my girlfriend. Back in January or so, one of her friends emailed her a link to JustFab, then she bought a pair of shoes from www.justfab.com and never visit the website again. Only 8 months later, in early September she was appalled to find out that her credit card has been charged a $39.95 fee for the last eight months. Yes, $39.95 for 8 months, without geting anything from JustFab.
I then did a bit research on the internet. It turned out my girlfriend wasn't the only victim. Apparently JustFab works like this: once you buy something from their website, you become their "VIP member". Then you will have to log into their website between the 1st-5th of each month and click “Skip This Month”. If no action is taken (either skip this month, or cancel your account), they just charge you a $39.95 fee every month.
According to the Business insider article, JustFab "will generate about $100 million this year" in sales, I wonder how much of this $100 million are from people like my girlfriend who simply didn't read their entire 2,500 words Terms of Service and were unaware that they were charged $39.95 a month for nothing.
Upvoted, I hope you get some more upvotes because this clearly is fraud or close to it. Some porn sites use this tactic and it should at a minimum cost them their merchant account.
Charge back as far as you can, most banks will do this up to 6 months no questions asked.
Credit card rebilling in a card-not-present situation is one of the few things where a consumer has a bit of power.
I'm sorry for your gf's loss, but from what you have described I don't see anything justfab did wrong here. Next time read the terms first before giving credit card info!
Do you read the terms every time you swipe your card to buy a pair of shoes or a bag in a regular store? Why should it be any different online? If the intention of a consumer is clearly to buy a single item once for a fixed fee then a forced membership buried in the terms of service is not what they expect, and not something they should suspect.
It's a ridiculous stance to blame a consumer for trickery like this.
"In the study, which follows up on another report done last year by comScore called the Power of Like, the research firm found that being a fan of a brand on Facebook causes people to purchase that brand more frequently.
For example, comScore tracked people who were Starbucks fans on Facebook against a control group of people who weren't exposed to those messages. ComScore found that over a four-week period, fans and their friends bought 38% more frequently at Starbucks than people who weren't exposed to the Facebook marketing."
social news, yes, but the larger part of the Pubup.org site is for research papers and scientific journal articles, I believe this is the first of its kind.
We are trying to build a system where users can share papers (both published and preprint) they deem important, write a short review/commentary on the paper: why it is good or not good, what else can be done, whether the experiment can be reproduced, is the conclusion solid or not, etc, then people can comment on the paper, comment on the reviews, upvote/downvote, any everything.
This is our fun side project, and we just launched 3 days ago, so badly need feedback from the community. Thanks for your comment!
Thank you for your input, yes, it is hard to attract users in this field, reaching a critical mass is even harder, and feel free to share the papers your read with PubUp. We just launched 3 days ago, and welcome all kinds of ideas. Can you explain a bit "a researchblogging-like trackback system"? PubUp.org does have a trackback when users link to the URLs of other sources. I took a look at your site, seems a very nice blog!
I just mean that you should make it easy for bloggers to work with your website, to leverage the science blogging community. Research Blogging isn't my website, BTW, I just submit articles there sometimes. But it's something you should look at. All these independent blogs write about papers, submit their blog posts to Research Blogging (baasically like a trackback) and then they are indexed and publicized by Research Blogging. You could maybe do something similar... say, add upvote/downvote buttons people could use that would link to an article on your site, and then have a trackback on that article linking to the blog post.
Yes, that's a good point. I think in addition to sharing research articles and reviews, the PubUp system can also be used to post or link to scientific news, blog posts, or anything related to the community, that's why we have a "News" category in addition to the "Bio, Chem, CS, Math, Physics, etc" categories.
