Unmanageable subscriptions and credit card challenges!

Farside26

Has anyone got any insight here. I have a subscription with a well known tea provider. Over the years I have had several different subscriptions which I have managed to delay or skip deliveries as required. Service has always been excellent. Last month my usual subscription reminder came through and I tried to delay it but the subscription was not showing in my account. I contact the company who said they were migrating their IT system and asked me to be patient. I replied saying that I didn't want to the tea and not to process the order. I chased this in a few days, was met with another request for patience but no action. The subscription was processed and the amount charged to my card! Because of the lack of effective response or resolution with the provider I contacted my credit card provider (Lloyds) to see if I could prevent any further charges to my card from this company. I was told that there was nothing they could do as the card was linked to the subscription and I would need to remove it via the company website (which wasn't working). The other option was to cancel my credit card!

Two questions:

1. Has anyone been able to get their credit card provider to prevent a subscription service from taking future payments?
2. What's the law on subscriptions provided when not required and when the normal intervention service has been suspended/failed?

Grateful for any insight or help. I haven't given up with the provider - it is a point of principle which is why I am asking about any legal position. :-)

MyRealNameToo

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/6679607/unmanageable-subscriptions-and-credit-card-challenges

If it is done properly the the subscription should be done via a Continuous Payment Authority and yes your bank can stop it and block the merchant ID it was setup on. Many large companies have multiple merchant IDs though and it is potentially possible that the merchant just creates a new CPA using a different ID.

Also worth noting that not paying is not the same as cancelling a contract and not dealing with the properly can result in breach of contract, fees for non-payment, debt collection costs etc in principle.

There is no automatic legal right to pause a subscription, what you can and cant do all comes down to the terms of the contract so you would need to read the T&Cs you agreed to. Many subscriptions dont allow you to pause them or if they do its for a very limited period else there would be no point in having a notice period to terminate as everyone would instead just indefinitely pause things rather than celling them.

If a lawyer worth their salt drafted the terms it should state how the pausing is to be achieved and potentially give the company some discretion over if a pause is accepted or not which ensures the process is low cost to handle, cant be abused and a get out clause for IT failures etc.

born_again

Speak to your provider & ask them to put a block on that retailer. They have to do this, but be aware without contacting the retailer & asking them to cancel. This is card regulations & not a legal right.

They can go legal to chase funds.

Grumpy_chap

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/6679607/unmanageable-subscriptions-and-credit-card-challenges

Just thinking pragmatically.

This is tea which you normally have some delivered monthly.

Sometimes, you skip a month.

This month, the skip did not process so you received the tea regardless.

Tea has a long shelf life.

Why not keep this tea to use when required and then skip next month? Or give notice to end future tea deliveries?

New_in_the_fens

In the Halifax app - which I’m led to believe is almost identical to Lloyds (we shall see when I migrate over!) there is an option to ‘manage subscriptions’.

Click on the account the subscription is linked to - then the three dots in the top right. One of the multiple options is ‘manage subscriptions’.

I’ve been able to block payments through that - no interaction with the bank required.

This might not be the exact pathway for Lloyds, but I suspect it is there somewhere.

Ahh - just realised you’ve paid by credit card - so that might not work - but I’ll leave the post up for anyone else in case they have a similar issue on a bank account!