This kind of billing scheme is actually incredibly hard to pull off these days. Although few laws have been passed to mandate anything, Congress has pressured Visa and MasterCard to crack down hardcore on chargebacks (disputed transactions). If you receive over 100 chargebacks in a month, current Visa/MC regulations stipulate that you must keep the chargebacks to less than 1% of your total transactions. If you go over that even for one month, you get fined an exorbitant amount for every single chargeback over 1%.

Getting fined is usually enough to get you thrown off your payment processor and added to something called the MATCH/TMF list, which you never want to be put on. Once you're on that list, you're completely and utterly fucked.

If you are terminated by one payment processor due to excessive chargebacks, and you try to get a new account with another payment processor, they first run a query on... you guessed it, the MATCH list. If you pop up on the list, every single legitimate payment processor will turn down your application "so fast it will make your head spin" (to quote a certain presidential candidate). How long do you stay on the MATCH list, you might ask? A minimum of 5 years, although I have heard from some people that you are on it for life. Basically, a MATCH listing blacklists you so you can likely never get a credit card processing account ever again.

HOWEVER... there are so-called "high risk" payment processors who "occasionally" will take MATCH/TMF merchants once you have been on the list for 6 months or more. But, it involves some luck and it will cost you.

Most mainstream payment processors like Chase Paymentech will charge you fees based on a pricing structure called "interchange plus," which is the base rate that goes to the credit card brands (Visa/MC) plus a padding fee of 25 basis points or less that goes to the processor (Chase). Depending on the types of credit card that your customers use, interchange ends up somewhere around 2 - 2.25%. But most "high-risk" payment processors won't even entertain the thought of giving you an account without charging at least 250 basis points plus interchange on a reasonably good account! But most of the time, they just abandon "interchange plus" altogether and charge you based on a 3 tiered structure (low, mid, and high rate). This allows them to pad the bill even more, of course. Not to mention that a whole mess of other fees are padded, as well, leaving you paying at least 6.5 - 7% per transaction when it's all said and done.

Oh, and I neglected to mention that if you expect to still accept Visa/MC, you still need to abide by their rules. So your options are: (a) get your chargebacks down to less than 1% of your total transactions, or (b) get less than 100 chargebacks per month. If you're a tiny operation, it's a little easier. You need to improve your customer service so that fewer customers dispute transactions. As long as the total value of your disputes is less than 3% of your total monthly revenue, you can usually fly under the radar. But if you're a small or medium sized company with 25,000+ transactions per month, you need to do some major surgery to your business model to stay at less than 1% chargebacks at all costs, and probably less than 0.75% so you have a little buffer in case your customers get a little trigger happy on the chargebacks in a given month. That basically takes subscriptions of any kind off the table, let alone "free trial" with autoship.

Which brings me back to my original point: a "free trial" with sneaky, fine-print autoship is actually INCREDIBLY difficult to pull off in this day and age. I am utterly baffled as to how JustFab, let alone Proactiv, the worst offender of them all, can pull this scheme off without getting MATCH listed. It especially makes no sense how JustFab has gotten away with this because it sounds like they have been sued left and right by private parties and the government for years. I can only postulate that they bring in such incredible amounts of revenue that Visa/MC and their payment processors simply turn a blind eye to it.