Magazines Direct Avis 808

Truly shocking experience. Made a subscription, immediately received an email saying that my payment has failed. Checking with my bank this was untrue. Contacted Magazines Direct for comment and received very mixed signals, firstly it was an error, then I did indeed have a subscription. When I asked questions and suggested something untoward seemed to be going on they unilaterally cancelled my subscription. Honestly, be careful if you have dealings with this Company. I’d avoid based on my troubling experience.

Below is my original One Star review. I was surprised to have a phone call from Nathan, a real guy not AI as I mention in the last part below!

He took my points most seriously and quickly found a solution and explanation. I’m pleased to say he kept me up to date with progress and that my concerns are now resolved. He’s also taken note of my finding it hard to contact by phone.

Perfect customer service!

We have had subscriptions for years and at times the post has let us down, a quick phone call always sorted things out. Cannot phone now, online only. Recently they stopped a subscription, three months later still not resolved. Awful service.

So ‘Nathan’ the AI bot has replied. I’ve already gone through that email address three months ago, still no magazine. Useless.

Cancelled an annual subscription to take effect in 11 months time. Instead they cancelled issues of my daughter's magazine immediately and despite repeated chasing have not reinstated the deliveries and are now ignoring my requests for a full refund.

UPDATED REVIEW

After having had an issue with deliveries from this company, they have now resolved my issue and I even received my magazines within a few days.

I demand a full refund of £48.00 which was deducted from my account on 17. 02.26 without my consent.
I have made multiple documented attempts to cancel this subscription prior to this charge, plus it wasn't due to be taken yet , but your system has made it impossible to do so. Furthermore, I am now unable to log in to my account to manage my details, which is completely unacceptable. Plus they took the payment when it wasn't due !!

Painful. Really painful.
Contacted them about a simple query.
Took a week to be told it had been escalated, then I was sent a link advising me on how to talk to my child, then I was asked to prove I had paid despite receiving 4 copies of the magazine at this point, then was told it had been escalated again, still nothing.
I assume my query will never be resolved which is worrying considering it was pretty simple. I paid for an offer and they are now refusing to honour it.
Terrible service, will not be renewing

Ordered the one off Ghost fan pack and received an email to say they would be in touch within 48 hours with more details. After a few days, I still hadn't heard anything and then saw all the negative reviews on here and got a little worried, especially after I noticed a reoccurring subscription had been set up. After 2 unanswered emails, I found a phone number and spoke to someone about my order and the reoccurring subscription seenas it was only a one off payment. He was helpful and polite and said the magazine had been dispatched the day before and should be there within the next few days and he wasn't sure why a reoccurring subscription was showing on my bank as it was only a one off payment.
A few days later my magazine turned up and it was only a one off payment, no subscription had been set up. Had a decent encounter with this company despite other reviews, would have given it five star except for not much of a response from the company in terms of dispatch emails and unanswered emails (which was then answered saying they will get looked into after I had received my magazine and the order and reference numbers didn't match up with mine).

After years of problem-free service with my Country Life subscription, I suddenly stopped receiving the magazine. Somehow my home address had become garbled in their system and the street and house number had been stripped out. Seems like a classic IT error when systems are changed. It has taken me 2.5 months to get this sorted, mainly because my impression of their contact / customer service system is that it is:

- largely bot-based
- not staffed locally
- avoids phone contact at all costs

And worse, they outright lied about their attempts to make human contact. When I gave them my mobile and asked for a call to straighten out a final detail, I got an email after 48 hours saying "I tried to reach out to you earlier." In my experience, that's a standard bot-based dodge for "We don't make or take phone calls."

Great magazine, but I really despise this company's customer service.

-----------

Update after the response from Magazines Direct below:

I feel obliged to include my response to Magazines Direct after receiving their response to my original complaint on TrustPilot.

Here it is:

Daniel,

I confirm that we spoke by phone yesterday. 

I further confirm you offered, and I accepted, a complementary six-month subscription to Country Life with the issue commencing 11 February.  

My subscription was already due to begin 4 February but I must tell you that I have no hope of receiving that issue given the company's level of poor customer service.  If I do receive the 4 February issue that will be a bonus. If not, then my already low expectations will have been met.

I further confirm that you offered, but I did not accept, a paid subscription at the end of the free six-month period. I did not accept because I was unwilling to manually enter my credit card details into the phone during our conversation.  

At the end of the complementary six-month period, I will simply begin buying the magazine from my newsagent.  

I have no desire to continue trading through Magazines Direct.

This has been a supremely frustrating experience, one of the worst I can recall given the level of effort a simple magazine subscription should require, as I expressed on TrustPilot. I do request that you convey that to your line manager etc.

Sincerely
J Hollar

I notice that the number (800) at the moment keeps going up but you at Trustpilot do not appear to be publishing them. The last being on December 19th last year.

You’d think in these tech times we could award zero stars for really rubbish companies! I’ve been with Magazines Direct for many years and put up with late or missing issues but got so much worse last year. So I decided to cancel my subscription, get a refund and pay the extra to get my TV Times from a reliable local store. Customer loyalty counts for little so cancelling was easy but I am still struggling after weeks and weeks to get my £9.68 refund. All manner of excuses and apologies from different customer service ( that’s a misnomer) agents but no money back. Just a continuous’ come back to us in 10 days’ response. What rubbish.

Extremely disappointing service. I took out a magazine as a gift for my mother last February. Unfortunately, the magazine was cancelled in the first half of the year, and they transferred it to another magazine for the rest of the year. I currently have 2 issues left. Randomly in November, they took money from my account. I contacted them immediately to ask what the reason for this charge was. They have either not answered the question, sent an irrelevant answer that doesn’t address my query or continued to ‘investigate’ with wrong dates and information. I’m still clueless as to why they’ve taken money from my account when I paid for an annual subscription that won’t be renewed for another 2 issues. Customer service non-existent at this point.

Edited 9/1: updating to add that despite poor service by email, Nathan reached out here and called promptly the next day with the situation investigated and resolved before ringing, which was very much appreciated. I am raising my review to three stars due to the support he provided.

EDIT: 05/01/2026

The company has contacted me and resolved the issue to my complete satisfaction and were polite and courteous. I have therefore increased my rating to 3 since the issue occurred in the forst place, but I iwll say has now been handled well.

*******************

I only gave one star because I couldn't give zero.

The company stopped publishing the magazine I was subscribed to and since they send a lot of marketing emails I didn't see the one where they said that if I didn't reply, they would switch my subscription to another magazine as opposed to refunding me for the rest of the subscription period.

Eventually I found the email and while I was rather annoyed, I thought it's only 5 months, I can live with that. It is only now that I have realised that they have continued to charge me for a magazine I DID NOT subscribe to! Also, I deliberately NEVER set up such subscriptions to auto-renew.

I have just tried to access my subscription and what a surprise, I can't set up an account which is required to manage subscriptions.

I am wondering if this borders on fraud? I don't know, but I will be finding out.

I would recommend people do NOT use this company.

Absolute GARBAGE company. Paid the £1 start up fee for 6 magazines, was told to wait for an email providing my subscription details. Received the email after 5 days, and it offered absolute NOTHING except a subscription number. I clicked on the link that said "OPEN ACCOUNT" low and behold i was taken to a page that was force feeding me crapp about digital reading of my magazine, NO ACCOUNT SET UP AT ALL. I went through the entire page looking for a frigging sign in, or account set up, BUT NO. So i went to the contact page hoping to find a phone number, BUT NOOO. Just a useless contact email where you have to wait another run of days for a response (i'm betting you won't receive) So i am left angry and frustrated at another rubbish company who had no problem whatsoever taking my money instantly, but can't provide a simple easy way of starting an account on a delivery of a frigging magazine, BECAUSE THEY don't want to deliver the frigging magazine, they want you to digitally read it instead. Disgrace of a company, and when my£1, 6 weeks is up, i will be heading back to bauer magazines, fantastic company, should have chose them first. I am sick of these pointless companies being run by god knows what..-----UPDATE---Canceled my subscription altogether, because on top of all the above i wrote, i received no magazines AT ALL from this company, email told me i would receive 1st issue by 30th dec, didn't arrive, contacted company and was told i would have to wait 4 FRIGGING WEEKS for 1st delivery (around the same time they take the quarterly payment) funny that. I was put through to canceling account dept, and the woman told me, i should have received 3 magazines by now, all from the 30th dec onwards, 1st being the previous Christmas issue., it's now 6th Jan WHAT!!!!. i CANCELED MY ACCOUNT. This is the worst company i have dealt with, take your money away from them at lightening speed. I am off to make sure my bank is aware of this company, and to head back to Beuer magazines instead. Please avoid this cluster dump of a company, they have no idea what they are doing, and are only about profit.

I contacted Magazines Direct early in December as I was having trouble logging in to my account and I wanted to check that a subscription I have was going to be renewed and get access to my account. All I received was an email from Marc saying that my issued were being looked in to and that he'd get back to me in a couple of days.
No one got back to me, but on the 12/12 a continuous payment was set up (without my authorisation or filling in any forms permitting this). I'm not sure that what they did was legal.
On the 22/12 another continuous payment was taken from my current account. I've emailed several times about the payment on the 12/12 several times and Magazined Direct are ignoring me. I received a feedback form on Christmas Day asking me to rate Magazines Direct which I find appalling.
My bank have done a chargeback for the unauthorised payment taken on the 12/12 and I would like Magazines Direct to apologise for the theft of my money and the unauthorised use of my bank details and for ignoring me when I've questioned the payment

Edited to add that Magazined Direct have managed to cancel my subscription (a gift for my Father) and have not addressed the fact that they'd set up another, unauthorised subscription in addition to the first, correct subscription. I have now no idea if my father is going to receive his gift and I've had an email from Ronald today breezily ignoring my asking about the continuous payment being set up fraudulently. Someone needs to phone me to sort this mess out.
Updated:
On Monday 29/12 I had a call from the complaints team who finally addressed the fact that an unauthorised continuous payment had been set up and agreed to refund me. I was told that I'd receive an email on the 30/12 outlining the conversation we'd had and I was told that as a gesture of goodwill I'd be offered a free subscription. However the email never arrived! I have no way to contact the complaints team as I was supposed to reply the the email from them. The company is a total shambles.

They sent 4 magazines to my brother who has been dead for 10 years. They apologized and explained they had done nothing wrong!

How about extremely distressing? Giving me "work" to do in finding out how to make a complaint? Having to find out how to return them to the disgusting company?

Since then they have sent another two magazines. After Christmas I think a visit to my solicitor is in order.

Edit 19.12.25 in response to their reply. My brother NEVER had an account while he was alive. It is extremely unlikely he has taken out an account 10 years after his death.

Ordered a magazine, still not arrived no correspondence from them their email is protected so can’t send email, no messages answered on their web site, so disappointed

I've bought a digital magazine to offer as a Christmas gift to a good friend of mine. I've bought it thinking that I would receive it in a PDF file after finishing purchase, but no, nothing received. I've been informed ONLY after purchase that I should and must install another platform to be able to read the magazine. There was ANY information before purchase about this platform and its mandatory use to be able to read their magazines. I feel I've been tricked. I've emailed them asking for a refund, explaining clearly my situation, but they didn't care less and replied with a vague email, not adressing my issue. SAD, just sad. They should be ashamed to trick and fool their customers like this. They should be punished. Making profit out of this, it's not correct.

Ordered Woman & Home magazine as a gift for my wife in September. An initial £6 for 6 copies. apart from emails to sign up for online magazines and after endless emails asking when a magazine would be delivered I cancelled the order.
I have received £5 back from the £6 paid with a promise that a copy of the magazine will be sent. I guess that was the £1 deduction. To date nothing has arrived.
Avoid the company at all costs

A subscription of 6 issues for a pound? To date I have not received anything and it seems they can’t lift a finger to write an email. I shall be contacting my bank to have them blocked, must be a scam.

Update: the same auto-apology from "Nathan" and then a ridiculous message saying the magazine will be received 2 days after publication. What an apalling waste of time.

I have a yearly subscription with Magazines Direct for Country Life magazine. I have not received an issue since 8th October. I've emailed with my query but so far have not received a response. This problem with delivery has happened before, and to be fair to Magazines Direct, once I rang them it was sorted. I would ask them, please respond to my email. And by the way, its not the fault of our postal service here in Ireland, ive checked with them.