Cancelling the credit card will not cancel your subscription to things such as this, according to my friend who works in the disputes and fraud department for a major bank’s VISA credit cards. You are still on the hook for any fees/charges generated by contracts that you have agreed too - and that includes sales agreements for TV-advertised products, diet pills, penis enlargement products and Internet porn. VISA/Mastercard/AmEx etc are not authorized to cancel contracts on your behalf. Your best bet is to contact the company that manages the finances of the product, and deal with them directly.
They are making an advertising ‘feature’ out of a disadvantage.
Making a big deal out of exclusivity, “not sold in stores”. But the fact is that the stores probably refuse to carry their item. Stores have limited space, and want to keep it for items that sell well.
Also, there is a downside – many of these things are poor quality, don’t-really-work items, that the buyer will soon be dissatisfied with. It’s easy for the TV or mail-order place to ignore mailed or emailed complaints. It’s a lot harder when you’re a local Target or Wal-mart store, and the buyer is standing there at your returns counter, yelling & screaming about the shoddy merchandise, and overheard by your other customers. You don’t want that kind of bad publicity, when you could have just as easily filled that shelf space with other goods that would sell as well, without all the returns.
I’ve worked at Target’s main headquarters, and they avoid this kind of items like the plague. They only carry them when they become well known enough that customers start asking for them.
Another side of this – more along the lines of “only available at X” than "not available in stores – is private label. For example, I’ve seen ads for the Macy’s I.N.C. clothing line proudly proclaiming that it’s only available at Macy’s. If they can differentiate their private label line enough that people specifically want it (rather than just choosing it as an alternative to a name brand), they’ll get people into their stores. They don’t want people to be able to get that stuff anywhere else. I personally think Macy’s has gone way too far with private label merch – it seems like 3/4 of the stuff in the store is from one of their countless private labels now. Since I don’t tend to like most of their PL merchandise, it makes me unlikely to shop there (there are other reasons I don’t like shopping at Macy’s, but the overwhelming amount of mediocre PL product is the biggest one).
Then there are arrangements like Liz Claiborne’s exclusive deal with J.C. Penney. There are various reasons that might happen, but I tend to think that in a lot of cases it’s a fading brand (Claiborne, Tommy Hilfiger, etc.) that’s probably not selling a lot and might be having trouble getting floor space in a lot of stores. The exclusive deal gives them guaranteed floor space and the merchant will probably put a lot of their own resources into advertising the brand. For the merchant, it can be a way to associate their brand with a popular brand of merchandise. However, if the brand is sufficiently weak (i.e. sufficiently desperate to enter into such a deal), the value is debatable IMHO…