I myself, tend to jump from the first paragraph, to the bottom of sales pages, and check the price, guarantee, and P.S.’s; before taking time for any additional reading. I only read the terms and fine print if I decide to purchase.

When information is “hidden” within the terms or fine print; the marketer is opening themselves to such charges. Few people will take the time to read the fine print; most are usually sold by the title, subheadings, benefits, and guarantee. Many never read the terms at all; they have conditioned themselves to just clicking through the lengthy legal descriptions (Bad choice but they do it). We as marketers, need to take this into consideration, and be up front about any additional charges.

I have heard many complaints about marketers making a free offering and then later billing on a regular basis. When I looked into it, and actually read the complete terms and all the fine print, the information was almost always stated. I only found one instance that I didn’t find the information stated somewhere in the sales page or terms.

I usually avoid accepting anything with forced continuity unless I purchase through PayPal(TM); then I can control the monthly payment feature. This saves trying to contact someone else and getting them to cancel the recurring charges which sometimes can be frustrating. I quit using some guru’s because of having problems with cancellation myself.

This is good old fashioned “Greed and Inertia” marketing.

These are the last 7 lines at the bottom of Mike Filsame’s
7 Figure Secrets Sales Page

All This, Yours Today, 100% Free…
Just let us know where to ship it
Extreme Limited Supplies
(Offer Good Only While supplies Last)

Click Here
Ship Me My FREE Report
Click Here To Have The Report Shipped For Free

What part of “Shipped For Free” do you not understand ?

Because when you click to continue and you are dropped onto the money-maker page, you find that there are shipping and handling charges.

Shipping and handling charges for a hard copy booklet
that could more easily and conveniently be an ebook

Why “hard copy” to a physical address with a phone number?
Read the Privacy Policy
You agree that all your contact details can be sold on to third party, direct sales “partners”

This is “greed and inertia” marketing. You want the free lunch. You do not want to be bothered with the details

Maybe it really is the buyers’ responsibility to check the small print and apply due care
but you are on the sales page because you trust David Congreave’s advice.
(He’s the nice, non-threatening English chap with a cap.)

There is nothing too wrong going on here but it is not too respectable either.

I used to love watching the showmen salesmen in the local market when I was a kid.
I got to know the assistants in the crowd who were “on our side” helping the sales along.
“Can you save one for me, love?”
“I’ll just see if there’s one left. - Oh, we’re down to the last two.
That’s one for you, my darling, and now who is going to get the very last one?”

The internet marketing game is the same, it’s just played on a different pitch.

If internet marketers want to gain respect and credibility then they must give respect and credibility.

(By the way do we all know that if you set up recurring payments on your credit card
and you are being supplied with the service you agreed to pay for,
then you cannot get your credit card company to stop the payments.
You have to get the payments stopped by the supplier.)

It was mostly Jamster (called Jambo in other countries – you’ve probably heard their ‘Crazy Frog’ irritating ringtone), who really massively pushed this, but other companies did it as well. They had a huge TV advert as well as press campaign promoting “12 FREE Ringtones – Just text ‘allfree’ to 123456” – and that was more or less all that was said in the ad.

What was not publicised much, or in some cases, at all, was the fact that when you texted in to their number, you were subscribing to a recurring billing payment, and your mobile phone was billed £4.50 (about US$9) a week!

The prices and the timescale of the repeat billing varied but for a long while the essence was the same – a mega offer (to young phone users) that tied them into a hidden recurring billing subscription that was then hard to stop.

Many unfortunate people (kids mostly) had all their pre-paid phone credit wiped out each week because of this, even weeks and months after sending in that seemingly innocuous text.

Imaging your child’s ‘emergency use’ phone having no credit on because of this, and not being able to contact you to say where they are. There were a few instances of exactly this.

Over a period of time there was a growing uproar from consumer champion groups and the Telephone industry Regulator, (OfTel, ICSTIS and then PhonepayPlus), had to step in to lay down guidelines that are just blindingly obvious, that they should have done from the start;

1. Making it clear from the start that it is a repeat payment subscription and,
2. Showing how they can easily cancel if they wish.

The long term effect has been that the mobile content industry has been tarnished as trying to dupe customers. Now other companies offering a legitimate recurring payment subscription for mobile content have a very hard time (we don’t offer phone content subscriptions for this reason).

If Filsaime and crew want to go down the route of sneakily hiding or mandating recurring billing subscription into their marketing, they would do well to look at the effect it has had on the mobile phone content industry in the UK and other countries.

In my eyes at least, he has already tarnished his otherwise good reputation by doing this.

The ‘free’ deal also includes a free trial issue of his magazine. There is a ‘checkbox’ next to the trial subscription offer that already has a checkmark in it….

I was willing to pay the $7.95 ’shipping’ charge for the free stuff, but decided not to bother with the trial magazine subscription. However, when I tried to UNcheck the box so I wouldn’t have to deal with UNsubscribing later, I discovered that it is not really a checkbox at all.

It is actually a ‘picture’ of a checkbox. You CANNOT uncheck it. You MUST accept the ‘free’ trial issue and agree to be billed each month. You then have to contact Filsaime to unsubscribe if you don’t want to be automatically charged $30 every month.

To Mike’s credit, he tells you how much you will be charged per month and when the charges will begin. He also gives you a phone number to call to un-subscribe…

But I still think the fake checkbox is more than a little sneaky. I decided to skip the whole thing and clicked away.

Thanks for making the ‘free’ offer… but NO thanks, Mike!

John R. Cumbow
http://www.MisspelledBargains.com
Find the misspelled eBay auction
bargains that other bidder miss!

I absolutely agree that if a large proportion of customers are complaining then something needs to be changed. If your reputation is sinking, it isn’t going to matter how good your intent was.

That said, if a forced continuity is labelled clearly then I think the number of complaints received would be little or no more than the usual handful of confused souls.

And thank you for some great alternative suggestions.

I went to a 30 (no continuity) membership alternative, and communicate closely with the member during those 30 days, experiencing
reasonable, But Happy, Conversions

Whether a particular tactic or regimen is legal within the letter of the law or not is not as important as the perception by the market being served of the practice of it. And that perception is a direct result of its representation.

Regardless of whether you can prove that you gave your customer ample and clear notice of additional charges beforehand, in the final analysis if they feel they’ve been cheated somehow you will not be able to change that opinion - even when in your righteous indignation you point out all of the instances where it was explained in detail before they clicked the “buy now” button.

Bottom line - if you’re getting complaints from a significant number of your customers, you’re not doing something right. Find what it is and fix it, or you will be righteously broke!

I agree with the others that forced continuity has become an integral part of many business models’ strategy for ensuring repeat sales, resulting in stability and continuance of the revenue stream.

However, I think most of us will agree that a growing contempt and suspicion of IM marketers is present in the marketplace - and in many cases is quite justified. As such, people will be quick to grab hold of anything which reinforces that stereotype in their own mind, regardless of our own protestations of “unfair.” We have the hordes of inexperienced people acting on headlines without reading the full details of the story to thank for that, and probably will for the forseeable future as more new people become involved.

A few months ago all the hype was making money on ‘membership sites’ and no it’s being called ‘forced continuity’ to give a newer, edgier, sexier spin.

Personally, I love the membership/subscription model because it is a recurring, residual income stream for me, and I don’t touch much of anything these days if it doesn’t offer residual income.

There is nothing wrong with the basic model - but when you combine it with subterfuge and deception - you are seriously crossing the line legally.

Everyone in the IM world knows what the ‘Google’ slap is - wait til they find out about the ‘Visa slap’!

The key? Just simply make sure your customer knows what they are buying on the sales page - and explain it again on the check-out page. If the checkout page says “Free 30 day trial, rebilled every 30 days at $29.99″ or something to that effect - you should be covered.

But leave out that rebill blurb…and just focus on those ‘mega bonuses’ and freebies - and we do indeed have a crises that could bring down the whole industry.

Melody

It do totally support membership subscriptions as an excellent passive income model, just not the way that some people are trying to do it at the moment i.e. trying to hide the presence of them.

It seems to me that, at the moment, it’s the big ‘guru’ marketers that are mainly doing this. They seem to have spotted a technique being used in another market that seems to be pulling in a lot of money and have implemented it in our market without really researching it and thinking through the consequences.

As Melody says, it’s not just the consequences for them that need to be thought about, but for the rest of us in the IM market too. As someone once said: With great power comes great responsibility.

Surely, if you are a big “guru” marketer with a lot of influence, it’s your responsibility to consider the bigger picture before you introduce something like this to the IM market that could have quite a devastating effect on the industry as a whole, as it has done in the other industries in which it has been tried.

Perhaps, we could all send a message to those who are attempting to use the shady technique of trying to hide the presence of a back-end membership by not signing up for them at all. Money really does talk, especially when you’re not making any …

Debbie

I really appreciate the comments from Melody Wigdahl.

Though, I still have some problems. In the event of a problem with a free mobile phone deal, then you can march on down to the local retailer and sort it out. In the event of a problem with a free connection for cable TV, then you can phone or email the company in your own country(ie the supplier)
However, with a problem in IM, where the supplier is on the other side of the world, where they will only accept communication via a phone call that requires you to stay awake untill the middle of the night to get on to american working hours.
And then you have to hang on to the phone for ever while you wait to be served, while you are being charged expensive overseas call rates.
If the IM marketer is genuine in making the offer that you can cancell, then the cancellation should be as simple as the initial sign up.

One step, online. Finished.

Further they shouldn’t try to charge extra postage costs to ship the book to the other side of the world. We don’t all live in america. It is a marketing cost that should be absorbed by the seller to allow every purchaser to be on an even footing.

cheers - greg