magazinesdirect.com

Subscription service horror

I'll start by mentioning I have been a subscriber to at least 15 different magazines over a decade with magazinesdirect. My mails to their customer support are in the hundreds, sadly most of them were treated poorly and to no avail. The only reason I stayed a customer is because there are numerous magazines that you can only get a subscription for through their service.One small complaint to begin with is the fact that subscriptions don't show up in the subscriber section, after numerous mails some of them get fixed, some don't. At the moment, out of the three active subscriptions I have, only one shows up. The only other one that shows up is a cancelled subscription.The biggest complaint I have deals with the magazine Retro Gamer. For some reason my subscription for this magazine ends up in trouble after a while. After some time I get notified they couldn't proceed with the payment. Weird thing is that I have had the same card linked to their services and it seems to work fine for all magazines except Retro Gamer. They put the blame completely on me and force me to call a paying number that is outside of Europe. If I contact them through mail, sometimes spending my time writing a big explanation, it's clear the person on the other end didn't take the time to read the email and I get standard responses where the blame is put on me. A few months ago I once again received a mail saying they couldn't perform the payment. So I again performed the only solution that works, which is cancelling the subscription, and ordering a new one, often times at a higher rate (edit: I think I have done this 6 times already). Sadly this one lasted not even one trimester. I received a mail that the payment didn't go through and they weren't gonna be sending any more issues. Weird thing is that at the time of receiving the email, I had only received one issue for the payed trimester, meanwhile I did receive the second one. But they still at least owe me one issue that I already payed for. In the mail again a foreign paying number, which I will not call seeing it will lead to nothing like previous times. I only see one solution, they send me the upcoming issue that I am still owed. And they try the payment again on their end till it works, I will not be giving them my payment info again, seeing it works fine for the 2 other subscriptions, furthermore a payment was taken for one of my other subscriptions recently without problem. Otherwise I will be cancelling all of my subscriptions because I have had it with this utter garbage service. I will also start looking into legal action if this is not sorted out.edit: Their site also doesn't seem to be working anymore at the moment

Date of experience: Jul 22, 2025