The Silkfair Social Media FAIL

In case you haven’t heard of Silkfair, they pitch themselves as a friendlier alternative to eBay and Etsy, though they do allow sellers to integrate their listings from both of those sites. “SILKFAIR makes buying and selling fun and easy.”

The Silkfair Twitter Party

In order to get the word out about their online marketplace, Silkfair hired Amy Lupold Bair – the inventor of the Twitter Party, aka ResourcefulMommy – to host a sitewarming party for them. Amy created a lot of buzz for them. She held an hour-long hashtag party, during which time partygoers were given the opportunity to win prizes. Silkfair was offering free custom stores to the prize winners. There were no qualifiers to this when I found myself a prize recipient. I was getting a free custom store on Silkfair!

My “FREE” Custom Store

It took forever for Silkfair to set up the free stores for all of us winners. And by the time it happened, our free custom stores turned into three free months of having a custom store. Custom stores generally cost $24.99 per month.

With my store set up, I decided I should list all of my old Tupperware from my Tupperware lady days… but life got in the way, and I only listed three things. One of them sold in December. I forgot about Silkfair. I thought my store would revert to a free membership once my prize ran out.

The Catch

Imagine my surprise when I was printing out all of my financial information to prepare for tax season, and I discovered that there were THREE separate charges – $24.99 each – to my credit card from Silkfair in December. When my prize period expired. I thought it might be a glitch. After all, I’d gotten an email from them stating that I owed them nothing for the month of December. It didn’t occur to me that the email also didn’t mention the 24 cent transaction fee for the Tupperware colander I’d sold.

So I checked it out this morning while looking for Silkfair’s contact form on their Web site. By the way, they don’t have a contact form, and their email addresses listed are not clickable. Not very user-friendly. It took me about 10 minutes to find where on the site my invoice for December was even located. And this is what I found:

So not only were they acknowledging by invoice that I was a winner from the Resourceful Mommy party, but they were indeed charging me for the three months that were supposed to be my free membership.

Much to my chagrin, I learned that my account also did not default to a free membership…I was charged another $24.99 – only a week after the other charges – for my continued membership.

I admit that I did not read the part on their site where it said it would bill me automatically each month… but it was NOT easy to find. I only found it after hunting for where  in the world I could cancel this subscription I didn’t want. Unfortunately, I didn’t think to screenshot the location when I found it, since it has now been replaced by a giant “UPGRADE YOUR ACCOUNT” graphic. Hint: It was NOT on the Fees/Billing page, where one would intuitively think to find how to cancel the recurring subscription fees.

I have canceled my subscription as of this morning, and I’ve sent them a sternly but politely worded email requesting that the charges be reversed. If the nearly $75 in charges from December are not reversed, my next step is to contact the Better Business Bureau and the Attorney General. In no communication was I ever told that I would be retroactively billed for my FREE 3-MONTH MEMBERSHIP. I have also requested that the charges from January be reversed as a gesture of good faith, since I was also not made expressly aware that I would be charged automatically if I did not cancel. (Who knew I should have hunted and clicked on every tab and sub-tab on the navigation menu to find this out?)

I will happily post an update about this Silkfair FAIL if and when they contact me to resolve this matter.This was a massive fail of communication, ease to find information on the Web site, use of social media to get good buzz, and just business practices in general.

How  Silkfair Could Have Avoided This Mess

• Emailing all prize winners to let them know expressly that this was not a free membership, but that we would be charged for the full amount if we  did not cancel our memberships prior to the end of the three-month period.
• Emailing all prize winners to let them know that they would be charged automatically on a recurring basis for the membership, and that it did not default to a free membership after the trial period had ended.
• Itemizing all charges – not just amount outstanding – on email invoice notifications to account holders. An actual detailed receipt of charges made to our credit cards. Account holders should be able to trust that email notifications concerning money are complete and accurate.
• Following good business practices and not trying to pull a bait and switch on active social media users who can – and will – easily expose shady business dealings when they could have been cheerleaders of the business instead.

Updated January 27: The  Silkfair Twitter account has told me that “We personally want to apologize to you for incorrect billing, & refunds were applied to your acct.” As of 5:17 pm, nearly 27 hours after that tweet, my Silkfair account reflects no refund, and my bank account has not received any refunded money. Also, despite the fact that I canceled my custom store subscription, the Fees/Billing page still tells me that I am going to be auto billed for $24.99 on February 5.

Tagged as: Business, FAIL, Social Media