Who else is upset and spent endless hours on the phone with Visa, Walmart customer service and their bank? Freaked out last week and after seeing the online headlines about this situation and having taken some coding courses, I dug in. I took some screenshots that stated Skio Secure, so checking the source code, it appears a Y Combinator start-up called Skio Subscriptions is the 3rd Party culprit. This means for many of you not involved in ecommerce, that the company hired to do the subscription part of our Beauty Boxes, is the party actually responsible for the coding error that caused us to be charged 100 times and some of us 200 times rather than just once.
For any of you curious to learn more, here's what's I've uncovered so far. I googled Skio and their Shopify App Store Page (Shopify BTW is the online platform that host's our Walmart Beauty Boxes Subscriptions) comically states Skio (https://Skio.com) helps brands sell subscriptions without ripping their hair out (I'm literally bald from my experience). Join brands like Liquid I.V., Bulletproof, Milk Bar, Bev, Fly By Jing, Immi, KraveBeauty, Glamnetic, Insert Name Here, & many more! We've raised $ Adjacent Venture capital fund, Kal Freese Co-founder, Taika, Adrian Alfieri CEO, Verbatim, Geoffrey Miles Chief Growth Officer, Bev and more. Looks like many brands invested in SKIO, have their companies hire SKIO as well.
Next, I scoured Skio's website, and found a former Engineer from Pinterest named Kennan Davison is Skio's CEO & Founder. Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/kennandavison & Twitter: twitter.com/kennandavison. At first glance it looks like Skio's Kennan Davison's has a team of about 30 employed. But, LOOK VERY CLOSELY and you'll see about nine or 25% of his staff represented not human beings at all, but just pictures and bios of DOGS & CATS with fancy job titles.
I was shocked, Brandshare & Walmart hired a cute little start-up that list dogs + cats as staff members, and who's Global Security Watchdog isn't a person, but rather Salem a dog. No wonder were all cancelling credit cards and dealing with over-drafts.
Walmart, Brandshare & Skio deserve the doghouse in my opinion. Who else believes its irresponsible and so odd that Brandshare who has built a successful E-Commerce media network that pulls in double digit Millions of $$ each year, and who's taken sampling effectiveness to new heights, with it's sampling driving conversions and building consumer brands, would hired SKIO to manage subscriptions for Walmart, a Fortune 10 giant, who's claims to have delivered more than 2 millions+ samples to its subscription box consumers.
WORSE, Brandshare was acquired by Advantage Solutions in 2022. I learnt Advantage is a publicly traded company, and for full year 2022 exceeded $4 billion. They're also listed on the Nasdaq Stock Market and what did we hard working non millionaire Walmart Customer's who were overcharged a 100 times receive? A mere $100 Walmart gift card for restitution.
Found this quote from Forbes online; Alan Verdun, Brandshare’s President describes the process as follows: “Our E-Commerce sampling is delivered to the comfort and safety of consumers’ homes as a “surprise and delight” moment that accompanies their online purchase from one of their trusted E-Commerce retailers.
This is my first post on reddit, but I found a lot people here also posting upset, not filled with "delight", but Alan Verdun is right we all did have a surprise, being charged 100 times and getting fraud alerts or having our bank accounts drained, and I'm curious what if anything anyone else knows about this?
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