Is JewelMint a scam?

Discussion in Scams = To Good To Be True started by plantain • Oct 13, 2014.

  1. plantain

    plantainMember

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    My experience with JewelMint was over a year ago, but with some quick Googling I found they haven't changed much at all lately.

    I thought JewelMint was a site like HauteLook, where discounted fashion items are offered. However, it doesn't work like a normal online store. When you first go to the JewelMint site you have to make an account before you can see anything. Fine, whatever. So you do that and you get to see a store full of jewelry items. Some things like watches are near $100 but most things are under $25. I like earrings so I found some nice looking ones, I believe they were either $10 or $15 and the shipping was free. So I put my credit card info in and make the purchase. Done deal, right? Nope!

    Luckily I happened to notice the extremely fine print on the confirmation email I got later. This text tells you that if you make ANY purchase on the site, you automatically agree to have your credit card enrolled in a "subscription" that costs $29.99 a month. I freaked out because I wanted nothing of the sort! Later I come to find out that if you want to cancel this subscription, you have to make a phone call. I did make the phone call and was able to cancel successfully, but this policy is very unfair to busier people who don't have time to learn all this and sit on the phone.

    The company's employees and a few of their fans will defend JewelMint's business model, but most people will call it a scam, and I agree. Even if they aren't blatantly stealing money it is still a scam because of these shady practices. There is absolutely no indication that the site is anything but a normal online store except for the (very) fine print at the bottom, and that is likely assumed to be boring copyright or disclaimer text by most people. Aside from that, how is this subscription thing actually valuable to anybody? There's this talk about "credits" and stuff which is confusing (intentionally I'm sure)-- it's trying to tell you that you can get items "practically for free" this way. I don't buy it. It seems to me that unless you have the money and room in your house to spend +$50 a month on low-quality accessories, this subscription is a total waste of money. If they are giving away items almost for free how do they make any money? Well it's obvious why: They make most of it from the poor souls who make a purchase and never notice the fine print, until a month or two later when they start getting the $29.99 charges on their card. Even if this service is valuable to somebody (I can't imagine who), there's Etsy and hundreds of other stores out there where you can purchase little $10 jewelry pieces without dealing with any subscription nonsense.

    The only positive thing I have to say... I did get my earrings and I do like them. They are made of plastic stones and some cheap mystery metal, and that's fine to me, because I wasn't expecting anything better for $15. Just wanted to give you an idea of the kind of quality they sell... I'm sure that 100% of their products are made in some Chinese factory, just saying.
    They look cute (even though one of the stones is glued on crooked, haha) and they have not tarnished yet. The pretty brown color goes well with a lot of things I wear.

    If you see ads for JewelMint (owned by BeachMint) and their sister sites ShoeMint, StyleMint etc... stay away!
     

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