How customers in Denmark can get refunds from 'hidden subscription' webshops

A ruling by the Danish Supreme Court has required three webshops -- buuks.dk, pluus.dk and sayve.dk -- to refund subscription fees to customers dating back to 2017.

The ruling upholds an earlier decision against the three holding companies of each of the sites, which have the same ownership.

Denmark’s public consumer watchdog, Forbrugerombudsmanden, originally brought the case to the consumer court Sø- og Handelsretten in 2022. The lower court’s ruling in favour of the ombudsman was appealed before then being upheld by the Supreme Court.

Specifically, the webshops were found to have misled customers by automatically registering them for a subscription when they purchase a product.

The automatic subscriptions obliged customers to pay between 89 and 119 kroner monthly. This gave them access to discounts on products sold by the websites.

Over 600 complaints have been filed against the three websites according to earlier media reports. A foreign resident of Denmark contacted The Local to say they had been “charged hidden automatic subscription fees for over a year” by one of the sites.

READ ALSO: Danish webshop customers entitled to refunds for 'hidden' subscriptions

In a press release on its website on December 8th, Denmark’s consumer ombudsman issued advice for customers who had paid for subscriptions on sayve.dk, pluus.dk, buuks.dk or any of the Swedish .se domains of those three sites.

A press advisor with the consumer ombudsman advised The Local that affected customers should be directed to the guidelines as described in its press release.

The exact rights of customers and actions they should take, detailed below, depend on when they made their initial transaction on one of the websites.

Transaction before October 30th 2017

• The webshops must refund all your subscriptions payments from October 30th 2017 onwards.
• If you do not hear directly from the company, you must contact the specific webshop to request a full refund. You should refer to the Supreme Court's judgment of December 7th 2023, which can be found here.
• You are also entitled to receive interest from each time at which a payment was collected.

Transaction between October 30th 2017 and May 6th 2022

• The webshops must refund all your subscriptions payments from October 30th 2017 onwards.
• If you do not hear directly from the company, you must contact the specific webshop to request a full refund. You should refer to the Supreme Court's judgment of December 7th 2023, which can be found here.
• You are also entitled to receive interest from each time at which a payment was collected.

Transaction after May 6th 2022

• If you believe that you did not agree to sign up for a subscription, the ombudsman recommends you contact the relevant webshop and state that you did not agree to any subscription.
• If the company rejects your claim, you can contact a mediation service at the Danish Consumer Complaints Board (Forbrugerklagenævnet). This can be done online for a fee of 100 kroner.

In the press statement, Acting Consumer Ombudsman Andreas Weidemann said that the Supreme Court ruling “shows that you neither can nor may earn money by hiding subscriptions from customers”.

“The Supreme Court has also ruled that the companies must repay subscription fees to consumers and that subscription fees were obtained through a practice that must be considered grossly misleading and clearly in breach of the law,” he added.

The Confederation of Danish Industry (DI) also backed the outcome of the case.

“We have a term in the digital industry we call ‘black hat’. It means to get people to go the way you want using tricks, not transparency,” the organisation’s senior consultant for e-commerce Mie Bilberg told retail media DetailWatch.

“For example, by making it difficult to see that the purchase is a subscription purchase and not a one-off purchase,” she said.

“So it can only be a good thing for it to be made clear that we must always be transparent when we deal with each other. Not just because the law says so, but also because happy customers are the only sustainable strategy in the long term,” she said.