Guthy Renker Meaningful Beauty

gruntled_not

Anyone have any experience of this organisation?
I ordered a few products from them a couple of weeks ago. Value £48 odd. As far as I was concerned it was a one off transaction. Nowhere, during the ordering process, did it say anything about further purchases. I'm pretty careful when I buy and I never sign up for subscriptions.
At 12.04 am last night they sent out an email advising me of my next shipment to the value of £75!
When I tried to get in touch, their customer service departments are closed at the weekend. When I tried to email, both the emails on their UK site returned a failure of delivery message.
I think the plan is to sneak the email in at a time you don't notice, make sure you can't cancel in the meantime and then next week tell the hapless 'customers' they have to pay because the product is already shipped.
Visa will not block payment. They will only allow you to dispute the payment after it has been made.
I've just discovered a raft of complaints all over the net about this mob. Really underhand stuff.
Any advice / your experiences etc much appreciated.

LemonGrove

Do you mean Guthy Renker as a whole? If so my Mum is close to obsessed with buying from them and to this date she's never had a single problem.

Did you order by phone? I remember a similar sounding problem featured on Watchdog about Vector Direct where people were unwittingly signed up for some holiday club by the phone agent and weren't aware of it until they noticed the charges. Don't know if anything similar to this has happend with you?

gruntled_not

No, I ordered from the meaningfulbeauty.co.uk site. I do the majority of my shopping online but no, nothing like this has ever happened to me before.

LemonGrove

When you order Meaningful Beauty® today you will automatically be enrolled into the Meaningful Beauty® Perfect Skin Plan. Every 3 months you will receive a new supply of Meaningful Beauty® products. You will lock in the low Plan price of just £23.33 per month (totalling £69.99 per shipment) plus £5.95 p&p

Is it anything to do with this? Those figures would explain the £75 at least?

gruntled_not

Thanks Lemon Grove, it may well explain it. Though it shouldn't - I ordered individual products and on the pages I clicked through there was no mentions of repeating beauty plains etc...

LemonGrove

That's what I thought, when you said you bought a few items I assumed you would have ordered from the extra products section and indeed it doesn't say you will be registered for the club. However since it looks like they've made you part of it, you should also be eligible to have it refunded too;

There are no minimum orders and you can cancel and rejoin at any time. Plan membership is FREE. You even have our 60-day money back guarantee (less p&p)

Good luck with cancelling.

gruntled_not

Thanks, LemonGrove. Yes, I ordered from the Extra products link.
I hope it will be resolved on Monday... Alarm bells started to ring when neither of the email addresses worked plus customer service telephone lines were closed - (a cosmetics retailer on a Saturday?!) Then when I did a search I found all these horror stories about people trying to cancel Guthy Renker repeat sale products.

gruntled_not

PS the cosmetics were pretty poor.