Free Trial Tips

Are you concerned about your credit card information when using it to sign up a free trial offer, worried about being billed thereafter if you forget to cancel at the end? Here I will share with you several useful tips and pitfalls from my personal experience with free trial offers.

Many of the free trial offers do give tremendous value to consumers for free. One example is Blockbuster Total Access 2 weeks' free trials. You can rent 15 to 20 DVDs for free with both the online mailing and in-store exchange. The other example is Yahoo music 14 days free trial. You can listen unlimited songs from 2 million collections using its program during the trial period. Similar valuable offers are provided in many other categories, such as stock trading, real estate, online library, communication tool, sports content, online video, game, online dating, etc. You can most likely find a free trial offer online for any service or product that you like.

Here are the few tips that would help you to find and sign up for free trial offers:

1. Use Google to search for free trials by keywords of "Free [category] trial offers"

2. If you are suspicious about the business that offers the trial, use "contact us" in the business website to call the customer service. If you reach voice mail during business hour, generally it is a small company and it might not be safe to give out credit card or other sensitive information.

3. Create a separate email for trial to avoid spam

4. Search the FAQ in the website for cancellation process. Most of the companies have a FAQ for how to cancel the subscription.

5. For online cancellation, most common route is to login to the website, go to "my account", find the link like "cancel my subscription." and follow the steps.

6. Get Credit Monitoring service (e.g. Identity Guard) if you are signing up free trial offers frequently and are concerned about identity fraud.

7. Set a reminder for end of trial to avoid being automatically billed after trials. Google Calendar [http://www.google.com/calendar] is easy to set up a reminder. TrialEasy also provides a convenient way for setting up both email and SMS reminder for your free trials

Hope you find this to be useful and I will post some more pitfalls about free trial next time. Here are two links from FTC that give general guidance and things to watch out when considering signing up free trials, you should read them if you want to know more about the free trial:

[http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/alerts/trialalrt.shtm]

http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/consumer/products/pro16.shtm

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