VitaCost.com

Full review
Vitacost.com, a company that sells vitamins over the internet, basically sold my credit card information to a company called "Shopping Essentials" which is an internet scam company that sets up recurring charges on its victims credit card accounts. The charges are $14.95 per month, and can fly under the radar for months before being discovered.
If you investigate Shopping Essentials, you'll find that they are really in the business of setting up and maintaining e-commerce websites for other businesses. In exchange for their services, Shopping Essentials gets the credit card information of everyone making a purchase at the websites that they have assisted. They then set up recurring charges on these credit card accounts. If you catch them, they'll tell you that you must have accepted their subscription offer when making an online purchase. These subscription offers are disguised as discount coupon offers (either toward your next purchase or for shipping.) The disguised coupon is used to both legitamize the scam and also as an attempt to shift responsibility to the consumer and avoid criminal prosecution.
I called Vitacost to complain about this scam. When I spoke with their representative, I was told that I must have clicked on an offer for a discount coupon; and by doing so, I had accepted the "Shopping Essentials" subscription. The representative at Vitacost tried to defend their actions, stating what a valuble service Shopping Essentials was offering. This reaction leads me to believe that Vitacost is also receiving some portion of these monthly charges since the only "value" must be to them (certainly not their customers.) If Shopping Essentials were really offering a valuble service to consumer's, then why the deception? And if Vitacost is a legitamate vitamin company, then why are they involved in scamming their own customers?
Equally disturbing is that I now believe Vitacost and their exclusive vitamin brand "Nutraceutical Science Institute" to also be a scam. Vitacost advertises that they are the exclusive distributors of this fantastic brand of "doctor recommended" vitamins called "Nutraceutical Science Institute" or NSI for short. It is very likely that Vitacost and NSI are the same company. They are BOTH located in Boynton, Florida. NSI vitamins are the main product line of Vitacost. Since NSI vitamins are not distributed by any well known distributor such as GNC or Vitamin Shoppe, their contents are not backed by anyone other than themselves. The only way for a consumer to be sure of their contents is to pay for a lab test(too expensive for the average consumer). If NSI really were a fantastic line of vitamins, wouldn't they want a well known distributor with a trusted name? Of course, legitimate distributors such as GNC, Vitamin Shoppe, and others scrutinize the contents of products they sell. I suspect NSI products to contain little if any of what they advertise.
My experience with Vitacost leads me to believe that they are partnered with Shopping Essentials in the business of scamming the public. I also believe that NSI is an "invented" vitamin brand of questionable content used as a "hook" to lure naive shoppers into their scam.