Mastercard’s Free Trial Protection Only Applies To Physical Goods

Recently Mastercard announced a free trial protection feature where it will prevent merchants from billing customers automatically once a free trial period of a product/service ends. It sounds like this would be ideal for subscription-based services on the internet, like VPNs, music streaming, video streaming, cloud storage, and so on.

However according to The Verge, Mastercard has since updated its post where they have changed and clarified the language to state that this free trial protection only applies to physical goods. The post now reads, “No one wants to be unsatisfied with a physical product after paying for it. For some consumers, a free-trial is a great way to test out a new product and get comfortable with it before making a purchasing decision. And with so many merchants offering free product trials, they’re becoming the new norm.”

Mastercard has acknowledged the change at a note at the bottom of the post to clarify that the protection only covers physical goods, such as skincare or health products and so on. Basically if you are subscribed to some kind of subscription service that sends you physical goods every week/month, then this is what the protection is for.

This means that if you forget to cancel your online trial subscriptions, then you’re pretty much on your own.

Tyler Lee
Categories: General
Tags: mastercard