Business ProfileforFIKS and Company LLC

Complaints BBB has received for FIKS and Company LLC allege the company charged the complainants' credit cards without authorization. 

“The FTC [Federal Trade Commission] uses the phrase “negative option marketing” broadly to refer to a category of commercial transactions in which sellers interpret a customer’s failure to take an affirmative action, either to reject an offer or cancel an agreement, as assent to be charged for goods or services.”

Regarding Negative Option Plans, Continuity Plans, and Automatic Shipments, the BBB Code of Advertising states:

"Any advertisement for a product or service that includes an offer to sell or provide consumers with additional goods or services under a negative option feature must include a clear and conspicuous disclosure of all material terms of the negative option feature.

Such material terms include:

• The existence of the negative option feature;

• The cost of the additional goods or services;

• How consumers can cancel and avoid future shipments and charges; and

• How consumers can return items that they do not want.

Advertisers must avoid making disclosures that are vague, unnecessarily long or which contain contradictory language.

Advertisers must not interpret the consumer’s silence, failure to take an affirmative action to reject goods or services, or failure to cancel the agreement, as consent to enroll the consumer in the negative option feature. Instead, they must ensure that the consumer affirmatively consents (either online, over the phone, or in person) to the negative option feature before enrolling the consumer in the plan."

Although the two public facing websites of the company, ravonplant.com and ravonlifestyle.com, contain the required disclosures, none of the complainants claim to have purchased from either website and their allegations suggest they interacted with the company by some other means and were not informed of the charges the company would make to their credit cards.

BBB wrote to FIKS and Company LLC requesting an explanation for our concerns that consumers were being charged for products under a negative option feature without being properly informed of the negative option. As of today's date the company has not responded.