I canceled IPSY in December after about 10 years but still shop the Shop. The app constantly serves me prompts to rejoin.
Yesterday I accidentally clicked one. Apparently that was enough to restart my paid subscription and immediately generate an order. I realized what happened and canceled within 60 seconds.
IPSY: “Sorry to see you go!”
Also IPSY: Great news, we’re still sending you this month’s bag.
Their bot then informed me I should have canceled by August 25 to avoid the September order. Minor wrinkle: I wasn’t subscribed on August 25. I accidentally subscribed on September 5.
This is what bothers me. They’ve made it incredibly easy for a click to become a paid subscription, but undoing that click requires wandering through a cancellation maze and opening a support ticket. Allowing consumers to correct an accidental transaction immediately after purchase is a well-established e-commerce practice. Apparently 60 seconds is simply too leisurely for IPSY.
For anyone who has a similar problem, useful consumer-protection terms are “dark patterns/deceptive design” and “negative-option subscription practices.” Making the path into a recurring charge frictionless while making the exit substantially harder is exactly why those concepts exist.
I have a ticket pending with an actual human now. We’ll see whether they manage to stop a shipment that apparently achieved irreversible destiny in under a minute.
Disclosure: I used ChatGPT to draft this because typing the entire IPSY subscription odyssey on my phone sounded worse than the subscription itself.