Lovefilm Free Trial: Alert

Long post. Apologies. To begin with, please keep the following information to hand; it has been compiled from a search of the Internet earlier today.

These are not published by LoveFilm on its website nor made available to subscribers wishing to go through the cancellation procedure.


LOVEFILM CUSTOMER SERVICES PHONE -- 0808 200 0193

LOVEFILM HQ phone - 0208 896 8000

CENTER]LoveFilm address[/CENTER][/SIZE]

According to Companies House:

LOVEFILM INTERNATIONAL LIMITED

NO. 9,

6 PORTAL WAY,

LONDON W3 6RU

The above address information tallies with the Freepost address which Lovefilm provides on its website T&Cs:

FREEPOST RRCA-EHAC-ZZKX
LOVEFiLM International Ltd
London
W3 6RU

There is also another address on the Lovefilm website which I presume is for the despatch / return processing of DVDs:

FREEPOST RRAZ-ZJJS-XESH
LOVEFiLM International Ltd
Peterborough
PE2 6UG

Many thanks to the redoubtable Edna who has posted on the free trial thread for the following information:

LOVEFiLM International Ltd, No 9, 6 Portal Way, London W3 6RU, UK

Email: support@lovefilm.com

LOVEFiLM (a registered trademark) is owned and operated by LOVEFiLM International Ltd Registered No: 4392195; Registered Office: 60 Sloane Avenue, London SW3 3DD, UK.

Edna has also posted:

LoveFilm.com, the online DVD rental service, has appointed former Sainsbury and Homeserve marketer Andrew Ground to be its UK managing director.

Thanks, Edna!

Many thanks to Spud who posted on the other thread, viz:

Trials are subject to the following:

Terms & Conditions, 10.1, Lovefilm.com website:

As noted above, you may cancel your subscription to LOVEFiLM's service at any time. Cancellation requests must be via the website, https://www.lovefilm.com. To cancel, customers must notify us online via the website by clicking on the relevant section and following the instructions under the heading "Cancel my subscription". This activity is tracked on the customer's account history. Immediately upon requesting cancellation, no further discs will be dispatched to you, unless they were processed by our warehouse a few minutes prior to your cancellation request. We are unable to accept or guarantee cancellation requests via email or by letter (either posted, or included with returns).

(Emphasis / Italics are mine)



Complaints on the Internet from Lovefilm customers are so many and so consistent that though the company may be entitled to claim that these are numerically small in comparison to the total number of Lovefilm subscribers, nevertheless there seem to be valid grounds for considering, or reconsidering, whether any kind of dealing with this company is advisable.

Posts on Internet sites are too numerous and too lengthy to be edited for reproduction here. A selection can be found at the following:

https://www.ciao.uk

https://www.uk-dvd-rental-guide.com

https://www.digitalspy.co.uk/forums

https://www.esato.com

Unless all these posters have come together in a criminal conspiracy to discredit Lovefilm, then the company's service and, especially, its cancellation procedure, seem to be less than best-in-class:

1. Cancellation. Despite the T&Cs referring to website instructions -- with the clear and deliberate implication that cancellation, like subscription, are both online procedures -- no such website cancellation is possible. Cancellation must be completed by telephoning 0870 609 5384. An email request for cancellation will most likely be ignored.

2. 0870 609 5384. Cumulatively it seems Internet posters have spent considerable sums of money in trying to contact a Lovefilm customer service handler. The number connects but time then spent waiting to actually speak to a Lovefilm representative can be as extensive as it is expensive. Nor does there seem, in every case, to have been any guarantee that the expensive call, or expensive series of calls, achieved anything at all because Lovefilm still didn't cancel the subscription anyway and kept on sending out DVDs.

3. Cancellation sequencing. Subscribers complain of the final DVDs in an initial subscription list not being sent out by Lovefilm until almost the end of a free trial period so that it is impossible to return them in time to avoid paying the Lovefilm subscription fee.
Or DVDs are returned to Lovefilm before the end of the free trial period but are then said by Lovefilm not to have been received until after the free trial period has ended -- so, the subscription fee is charged.

4. The Lovefilm free trial is by virtue of the way it has been designed not necessarily a free trial at all.
This is because Lovefilm places a charge against the user's bank or credit cards at the outset, a charge which it says is there to protect itself from fraud but which, in the event of a free trial customer failing to complete the cancellation process for whatever reason, automatically allows Lovefilm to put that charge into place.
So whether or not the subscriber, Lovefilm, Royal Mail, or sundry other third parties, agencies, Acts of God or system 'failures' and 'overloads' are to blame for a DVD not being officially in Lovefilm's possession by the end of a free trial. . .

Tough.

5. Customer service. Posters complain of being told that Lovefilm has been unable to answer the telephone because of "overload" and unable to respond to emails because of "overload". And that these "overloads" appear to be a not uncommon occurrence. One complainant reports that Lovefilm even said it was unable to deal immediately with problems with his account because his postcode area was the same postcode area as that of another member.
There are repeated complaints of emails going unanswered or being unacknowledged for up to weeks at a time. There are also complaints of getting "no sense" out of a Lovefilm representative when finally getting through. Or of then being subjected to pressure to sign up, or take up another offer instead of cancelling.

6. Lack of openness. Lovefilm has no registered address on its website. No telephone number other than the 0870 number. The Lovefilm postal addresses are opaque because of the use of the FREEPOST system.


In conclusion:

I should've known better than to sign up yesterday to Lovefilm without first checking on the web. But time was short yesterday so I didn't.

I will be cancelling my Lovefilm subscription after receipt of the first DVDs.

That there is something potentially unwise in dealing with this company seems to have been borne out already by the Advertising Standards Authority, which has censured the company for failing to make any mention in its advertising of a "fair usage" policy which, Lovefilm says, it operates to maintain the efficiency of its rental service. . . but which the ASA says can impact on users who find they are not then getting the frequency of service or number of DVDs they were entitled to expect.

If as another poster has stated elsewhere, Sainsburys has ceased to deal with Lovefilm, it's a mystery to me why a company with such a strong brand name as Boots should be associating with it.

Then again though, all those Internet posters, as well as the Advertising Standards Authority, may have gotten hold of the wrong end of the stick. . ?

* Lovefilm subscription cancellation: I would be interested to read the posts of any other MSErs who have signed up to the Boots / Lovefilm free trial and who decide to cancel.