laringo  says:
11 months ago

I'm a little confused still. I drink Oolong tea quite regularly because I love the taste. Is it the same as Wu-Yi tea, or does it have to be a specifice brand? I never heard that Oolong and Wu-Yi wre the same. Can you let me Know. Good article nonetheless.

L.S  says:
10 months ago

11th February 2009

In November 2008 I was browsing the web for inspiration to motivate me to lose a few pounds in weight. I do not believe in quick fix, lazy methods and I know that a healthy diet and plenty of exercise is the only way to achieve your goals – No pain, no gain! But I stumbled across this Wuyi Tea and they sell it so well on the website that I thought I would give the free trail a go. With the money back guarantee, as they say, ‘what do I have to lose’…..I’ll tell you.

Firstly, I am on a site that claims to be for the UK and ends in co.uk. Clearly everything on the site is in USD but I figured that they must have a UK distribution as well.

You have to enter your name, your current weight, your goal weight, your height and gender for them to calculate whether or not you qualify for this product as they say it is not for people who just want to lose a few pounds. This is funny because I have since entered a fake details of someone very tall and underweight wanting to lose just 4lbs and it says they qualify despite displaying this fake person’s BMI as dangerously underweight.

On the next page it tells you that if you do not fill out your details within 4 minutes it will time out. How is this fair trade? Surely you should be given as much time as you need to read all the details carefully? Anyway, if you read fast enough, this page does tell you about two supposed bonus offers they will give you which are ebooks. Personally I did not read this first time round and after 3 months of credit card bills have finally noticed they have been charging me monthly for these two ‘bonus’ offers which apparently you have to revisit their website to download. I didn’t even want these, never had them and yet have still paid for them.

So once you have rushed through that page and entered your name and address, you are taken to the page that requires your credit card details. There it states that you are just paying for the shipping fees of $4.95 and then if you are happy with the product after 14 days they will bill you for it later (monthly). It does not however, say anything about the shipping costing more if you are outside of the USA. I would have expected it to as common sense tells you that you would pay more to send something overseas but then I am on a .co.uk website so maybe not? You enter your credit card details and it asks you to confirm that you are happy to proceed to pay what was around £2 at the time. This is stated on the page in GBP so seen as they had converted it automatically, I was pleased to agree to pay that small amount for shipping to give this thing a go. The next page pops up saying that you for paying us $24.95 at which you can imagine my shock. At no point did I agree to that. For postage of £16.87 I probably wouldn’t have bothered. There is another page somewhere on the site that tells you in small print that outside of the USA the shipping costs more but it had not been shown anytime prior to this stage of the process and I was not happy.

I got in touch as soon as possible to cancel everything and tell them it was a mistake but they said it had already shipped. I’m sure this was a lie because it took a long time to arrive. They said all I could do was return it once it arrived and then they would refund it. I thought that would be okay so that is what I did. They asked me to send it by UPS or similar but for the cost of over £50 I decided to send it recorded via Royal Mail at just over £10 because they were not going to pay the postage for me.

Assuming I would just be around £10 out of pocket I was annoyed but relieved to think this was almost over. No such luck… They would not refund the initial $24.95 for postage overseas to send me the product I did not even want and had asked not be sent to me. They then took a further $59.95 from my credit card for the product as if I had kept it. I had to get in touch again and this was refunded. I asked them to remove me from all records and never charge my credit card to anything again.

I thought that now close to £30 out of pocket, it was all over and I could put it down to a learning experience. Today I saw my online credit card statement showing two payments having been taken yesterday. One for $4.95 and one for $9.95. I looked back and saw that these same two payments had been taken at the beginning of January and the one for $4.95 had been taken another time in December also. That is a total of $34.75 between December and February and I had no idea.

I contacted the credit card company who said they would dispute it for me and once they told me who was taking these fees, I contacted the WuYi Tea people yet again. This time I was given two USA phone numbers to call to cancel these two subscriptions. I did this and they said that although I would make no further payments, they would not refund anything. Am I going to find anymore hidden traps in this in the months to come?

This whole episode has cost me around £50 now and I have had absolutely nothing for it. No product, nothing but stress, aggravation, time wasted and money lost. I think it is outrageous that anyone can operate in such a way. It is not only misleading but I am certain that they actually lie on their website. I don’t know if there is anyone I can go to to claim any of my loss back but I really want to stop other innocent people from falling into the same series of traps with these people.