Pizza Hut Web Loyalty Program
Alert for Pizza Hut Customers: Watch for Unintended Charges for Web Loyalty Program
How many families every week order pizza—that pioneer of delivery foods—online? You can look for the best deal, check your order and watch the progress of your pizza from prep to delivery. But consumers may get more from their online order than the pizza they wanted, and it has left a bad taste behind for some pizza lovers.
While ordering pizza from Pizza Hut, you might see an offer for pizza coupons. But be sure you read the fine print! Pizza Hut’s Web Loyalty program offers online coupons when you place an order, but if you provide your email address, you aren’t simply giving Pizza Hut a way to deliver coupons to you in the future—you are enrolling in a membership program that, after the first 30 days, will charge you $12 per month unless you cancel it.
If you give your email address to get the pizza coupon, Pizza Hut will send your credit or debit card information to Webloyalty.com, which will charge you every month for the membership you probably never meant to accept.
Webloyalty.com claims that it sends email notifications at the end of the 30-day trial period to give customers an opportunity to cancel their membership before billing starts, but it seems that these notifications are often screened out of email accounts as “spam” and never seen by the consumer.
In a recent news report, one family said they ended up with two memberships, and had charges on their credit card statement of $24 per month from Webloyalty.com, without knowing or planning to join a paid membership program. They just wanted to get the pizza coupons they thought they were being offered as a free gift.
According to John Riggins of the Better Business Bureau’s Fort Worth office, the Web Loyalty program uses negative option marketing to obtain members for its program: it assumes that you want to buy the membership unless you tell them—in the right way and at the right time—that you don’t. See Why You Should Read the Fine Print Online. Using negative option marketing is a violation of Better Business Bureau standards, says Riggins.
