Honestly good for Amazon getting caught saying the quiet part out loud. Maybe it will lead to some legislation banning the practice but probably not since “anything that’s good for business” is seen as some intrinsic good even if it’s at the expense of Americans.
Amazon - directly and indirectly - generates a massive amount of (tax) revenue for government. It's hard to imagine W.DC, let alone state / local gov, suddenly growing teeth and a backbone.
We're better off coming up with our own solution(s). Or at least trying.
I think what's just as bad is how Amazon tries to trick users into signing up for Prime. Multiple dark patterns, it's scummy and I'm sick of getting called up by family members to help them unsubscribe.
The other day I tried Prime Music and quickly discovered that my Prime subscription means I have to be advertised at every 30 seconds to upgrade to "unlimited", whatever that means.
I went away back to Spotify, where I pay for a thing and get that thing (even if they keep insisting I listen to their podcasts too).
Right! I got a free Prime subscription, so I thought I'd check out the famed Amazon Music. Er. It was not what I expected. It is not an all-you-can-eat like Spotify or YouTube Music or Apple Music or everyone else. It's basically just a trial for their Unlimited thing that you have to pay full price to get.
I actually just cancelled two days ago and was shocked at how painless and easy it was. But now I have my answer why- they got caught and the pendulum swung far to the other side.
Presumably. The article doesn't mention anything about Amazon changing their policies as a result of being called out. But my experience was certainly not what was described in the article- basically a single button click.
Big fat edit: OK, I was wrong. This article and the other comments here made me go double check and sure enough, the cancellation didn't go through. Perhaps I fell prey to a dark pattern, but I seem to remember seeing different pages. Maybe an A/B test. Either way, good timing on posting this article!
I literally canceled right now and had to confirm several times navigating identical non-cancel buttons, scrolling past several promotions that made it look like the process was over (like the ads at the end of an article) to find one of the confirmations.
I mean it’s ok if you read everything expecting it to be a horrible process. There’s a lot of “if” you cancel instead of you “have” cancelled that provide hints you aren’t done yet.
I canceled in January. It takes several clicks through buttons and sometimes small links. It alternates the styles with negative or positive wording sentences, alternate offers. They try to convince you to get an email reminder 3 days before the renewal date instead of canceling. After you canceled, the only call to action on the confirmation page is to cancel the cancelation. You immediately get an email to easily cancel the cancelation as confirmation that you canceled.
I was prepared for a dark pattern fight, I was not disappointed!
I also cancelled a month ago. It doesn't stop there though. I've ordered stuff from Amazon since then and every order still prompts me to use Prime or select it for the fastest shipping. Interestingly I'm still getting my packages on average of 2 days without Prime. The only downside is having to spend the $25 minimum for the free shipping, but I tend to buy things that exceed that price anyway.
> Interestingly I'm still getting my packages on average of 2 days without Prime.
Yeah, the way they make Prime work and affordable for them is to locate warehouses everywhere, close to recipients. People have been observing 2-day non-Prime delivery times for years now. They'll also usually offer you a month-long free Prime trial once a year and you can do a batch of holiday shopping or whatever.
I spend enough on Amazon that it's still worth the extra percentage cash back on the Amazon card, but I'm not sure how much longer if these price increases keep up.
Likewise, cancelled in Feb because I'd like to buy from smaller merchants directly when possible. I can buy toilet paper from Amazon still and get free shipping, so... no loss, really? Amazon was already nagging me to bundle separate shipments together on "prime days", so it literally makes no difference to me.
The dark patterns on cancelling my subscription were so disgustingly manipulative that it made it really easy to be happy with my decision to leave, though. I admit to feeling a tinge of regret when I quit a service that politely allows me to cancel because that actually gives me some respect for the service. With Amazon, Spotify, Facebook, and Instagram, they try SO hard to make it impossible to leave that it cemented the decision completely in my mind and eroded the last bit of respect I had for those platforms.
I cancelled a couple of months ago (was on a Student membership and wouldn't let me extend). Things still take only 1 or 2 days to ship, but they hold off on shipping it for about 3 or 4 days.
> Things still take only 1 or 2 days to ship, but they hold off on shipping it for about 3 or 4 days.
I've had prime for quite a while, and I still get this for some items... But they're usually upfront about it and say the expected delivery is in X days before I complete the order.
Yeah the text is confusing too when you have the free trial, it makes it sound like your benefits stop immediately, making you want to wait till the last minute to cancel, when you can cancel straight away and keep for thirty days.
As a non prime member they make it hard to buy things too, with extra screens trying to offer you another trial for a week for 99p and always defaulting to offering that and paid delivery.
For me, Prime is way too expensive, i don't want there crappy video streaming service.
Don't worry a competitor will quickly swoop into the market and offer such an alternative, forcing Amazon to decouple these services, improve their video streaming or reduce bundled costs. They are in no way in a monoplistic type situation with such high barriers to entry that competition doesnt regulate them. /sarcasm
Reading that resulted in a rollercoaster of emotions. Yeah, government action will be needed for above to happen, but Bezos already seems to have bought them off...
I kind of wish the inverse - they have some really good shows on Prime video, but I don't buy much anymore on Amazon (local stores have really stepped up the same-day delivery game).
I think I agree that Prime by itself is not worth it. But if you get the credit card, the extra cash back on $4,500 worth of purchases on Amazon makes it pay for itself. This is being extremely generous by pretending you can get 2% with another card. Personally, even comparing with local stores and buying the cheaper option, it pays for itself. Then there is cyber Monday where I basically get all the Christmas gifts which add up real quick. Plus, I really like not having to minimum spend to get free delivery.
If Whole Foods counts (no idea what the specifics of the card are), it's not too hard at all. It's very easy to spend over a hundred a week there if you're feeding more than one person.
Worth checking out, but it’s possible to get much higher rewards on a single category like groceries.
“6% Cash Back at U.S. supermarkets on up to $6,000 per year in purchases (then 1%). ” Blue Cash Preferred® Card from American Express which Whole Foods accepts.
"(superstores, convenience stores, warehouse clubs, and meal-kit delivery services are not considered supermarkets)"
Which is to say most Walmart stores, or a more liberal interpretation "plebs need not apply". Though I found out it does work with the pick-up option, but I absolutely loathe not being able to look at what I'm buying.
The credit card comparison space is incredibly lucrative-- that is why Bankrate/Red Ventures bought ThePointsGuy. But it isn't really that objective anymore when it comes to comparisons, since if you're an affiliate for a bank, they heavily dictate how you can include their products on your site. There needs to be a simple tool for users to plug in their spending and easily see the best options based on sign up bonuses, rewards, annual fees and rates. The problem is that by being overly objective, you end up alienating the banks who are paying the referral fees.
> This is being extremely generous by pretending you can get 2% with another card.
At Amazon? No. But with two cards I get:
Grocery: 3%
Gas: 2%
Restaurants: 3-4.5% [0]
Travel: 3-4.5%
And I'm not even trying all that hard... There's entire groups dedicated to min-maxing this stuff that can probably blow the above right out of the water.
Yea, I would put myself in that group. Most of this obviously comes down to personal spending habits. The only category that is really applicable to Amazon is the grocery category. For the purposes of the Amazon website, I would counter that the subscribe and save is often much cheaper than the store. I'm a little surprised that my original comment got downvoted that Prime + credit card makes sense if you spend $4.5k on Amazon. I don't eat meat and so my protein purchases alone through Amazon equal $500/year. People on HN I guess think that spending $4,500 per year on food and other essentials is unreasonable.
Ah, I see. I misinterpreted your comment. You meant the 2% base vs the 5% with Prime. And were making a conservative calculation based on the 3% difference, even though it's not likely you could get 2% back with a different card.
$139 / .03 = $4,633
I mean, this is exactly the type of math you should do to evaluate options like this. No controversy here. If you're spending more than that anyway, it makes sense to get the Prime card. Anything you spend beyond that amount is earning you more than the non-Prime card, and that's even just flat out valuing Prime at $0 and treating it as a fee.
> I sometimes get the trial to ship something to my parents.
So you're abusing a trial to get something for free that actually costs the company money.
But then you complain that the company tries hard to keep you from cancelling the trial? How does that make any sense?
You are well within your ethical rights to take advantage of a trial offer. And the company is well within their ethical rights to try to convince you to stay. Three clicks online to cancel is hardly a burden.
We understand, maybe you aren't spiritual. That's okay! We value your business regardless. But you should consider that Jeff Bezos is a powerful billionaire that may one day bring about the Singularity and become Roko's Basilisk. We're not fucking around here, and we're upping the stakes: Some gods may be merciful, but Roko Bezos is not one of them
[Spend no money outside the Amazon ecosystem ever again] [Consign an endless number of sentient emulated versions of yourself to an emulated lake of fire]
I'm reminded of the dialogue box presented by the Analytical Engine in the awesome graphic novel, "The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage" by Sydney Padua:
*Annulation Lever Activated - do you wish to continue? Engage STOP lever to continue. Engage CONTINUE lever to stop."
They do the same sort of thing on Audible, where I'm an on-again/off-again subscriber. In one of my temporary departures I went through those options too fast and only realized I hadn't actually cancelled when I received the following month's CC charge.
The worst part is that the answers to the second two questions are sort of irrelevant, yeah, I'd rather enjoy those many benefits, but yes I'm still sure I want to cancel. Yes I'll miss the benefits, but I'm still sure I want to cancel.
It is a linguistic maze. The readership here is literate and even we endure mental strain navigating this viper's nest. I've went to buy a paperback and found myself signed up with Prime with just one wayward click, and I was being very cautious.
Now imagine how it is for those less familiar with letters. How many folks only notice they've a Prime subscription when the montly bank statement arrives?
It's a shame. I used to think so highly of Amazon.
Yeah, my Grandma (chemo-brain-fog-addled at the time, now just terminal-cancer-brain-fog-addled...) accidentally signed up for Prime while buying a Secret Santa gift, had to help fix that (she didn't even know that she had an Amazon account, much less that she had a monthly Prime subscription).
We should take this completely out of companies' hands. The incentives are too perverse and too prevalent for anything good to come out of playing dark pattern whack-a-mole through legislation or, worse, "promoting dark pattern awareness" or some other brand of blame-dodging hogwash. Companies are stealing money and getting away with it. We have the technology to stop them. We should stop them.
I suspect the easiest way to do it would be to give credit card company cancellation buttons legal bite: unless someone signs physical papers and does credit checks (e.g. for housing and utilities), nonpayment must be respected as a request to cancel and not creatively misinterpreted as an invitation to extend credit, charge fees, and accumulate interest.
Nah, CC providers would love to provide subscription management and cancellation services. They implement dumber and more expensive gimmick services all the time. They'd implement this one in a heartbeat if they could.
Right now, they can't, because they have no privileged way to cancel a service on the user's behalf. They can withhold payment, yes, but under current consumer contract law withholding payment doesn't imply cancellation. We should change the law so that it does. Once the law changes, they would implement "cancel buttons" and "subscription management" so fast your head would spin -- and then they would flood TV and youtube with ads about it, and they would bug you every time you logged into your CC statement for the next year.
The self-interest on the credit card company's part requires they have a financial incentive. I don't think they care about customer satisfaction enough.
... the way to do it would be to disincentivize subscription companies from having credit card companies involved in cancellations.
(1) Pass laws to empower credit card companies to cancel services on a user's behalf, if the user so requests + (2) Allow CC companies to collect a fee from the subscription service when they do so.
CC companies will implement the feature as a profit source, but subscription services will also be incentivized to flow cancellations through themselves (because it's cheaper) thus leading to more streamlined cancellation.
It could also become a competitive / marketing advantage for the card that implements it first, so I don’t even think it’s needs to be made into a profit source.
I can cancel any subscription on paypal web site. Banking system should adopt that: list every subscription on bank website and allow one-click cancel.
It's not the Banking system's choice. It's a matter of contract law between the customer and the service. Once the contract law is changed, the Banking system can implement the feature.
This problem doesn't require a technological solution. A legal solution is perfectly adequate. In Sweden, for example, you can inform a company of your wish to cancel a service by email or letter or phone call or...probably there are more options I'm unaware of. Given such a right, you never need to play the games that companies want you to play.
I've never had issues requesting a chargeback if a service auto-charged me that I didn't desire to use or be charged for.
I've done this to the NHL, Comcast, Sirius, Uber, etc. Considering some places don't even offer a way to contact support (Uber), chargebacks are the only way to handle this sometimes.
Not legally. If you hit "Agree" on a contract that says you will pay until cancel and then you stop paying without canceling, you're still legally on the hook for the payment. Technically. Most companies won't actually send you to collections. But they can, and sometimes they do, which is why credit card companies can't make GUIs to bring your subscriptions front and center with nice user friendly "cancel" buttons. Sometimes they still try to do this, but behind the scenes someone has to cancel on your behalf so it isn't reliable.
Upgrading your strategy from "technically illegal" to "legal and normal" is how we bring it to the masses :)
> Companies are stealing money and getting away with it.
Are they? I think that those companies misunderstand how easy it is to lose trust and how difficult it is to gain it. Humans are extremely good at remembering who can be trusted.
I think the easiest way would be to make it legal for consumers to block subscription payments, nothing - and demand companies just deal with it. That it means nothing more than that the subscription ends. Nothing more, nothing less.
I've started the process of closing my account last week. I need to download my order history for tax reasons but then I'm clicking on that confirmation email.
I'm not a Prime member and it feels like I'm being tricked into becoming one whenever I've placed an order. I'll probably suffer with higher prices or slower delivery for some things but I can only tolerate these sorts of things for so long.
On the other hand, cancelling once you are billed makes the entire charge reversed. So there is that...The even worse outcome I've experienced (from other businesses) is cancellation would only take effect on your next billing cycle. That does not seem to be the case.
Source: personal experience
A bonus is that they use language which leads you to believe your services will immediately end, even if you’ve purchased a year-long subscription and have months left.
It wasn’t until the second or third panel where I found a statement (in the smallest text size possible) that told me services would stay active until previously-billed time ran out.
In light of all of these dark patterns, I have gone a different route.
I use burner virtual cards, through privacy.com. This way, I can terminate my card instead of having to deal with the nonsense that cancellation has become.
This might have some repercussions, such as account terminations, however, I only use this method on websites that I have disposable accounts with. It is well worth my time to keep using virtual cards for as long as these dark patterns exist.
The problem is that the fine print on Amazon Prime says they'll use any card you have on file to continue it if the one you initially selected doesn't work.
I know someone who recently left one of Amazon's services {Video, Games, Music, etc.} and they basically had a free membership for dogfooding. When they left Amazon, the free membership was automatically set to renew on the monthly date for the full price of $20 or whatever it was.
i.e. they'd been charged 0.00/mo on X date every month while working for that org and then they checked after quitting and noticed it was set to auto-renew on the next date for the full price.
They didn't get any kind of notification about it beforehand. Canceling that was apparently the same kind of affair as this.
I guess part of it comes down to their ex-org's bug surrounding how a dogfooding prod subscription is granted/revoked but in the end they were treated just like a real customer.
I canceled around December and it was shockingly easy. Just a few clicks and it was done. It even gave me a prorated refund for nearly the full amount of the cost of renewal (I forgot to turn off autorenew and it had been a couple weeks after the renewal). It was actually the easiest cancellation experience I've ever had.
I kind of wonder if they have an algorithm to check your purchase history and if you've given Amazon enough profit over the years (which I certainly have with over 23 years of purchases and at least 15 years of prime) then it just makes the cancellation a piece of cake.
I think people just have a different definition of hard. I cancelled my Prime membership several times in the past (not using it too much, changing countries etc) and it’s definitely not a single button - the process is clearly done to have some attrition and make you reconsider cancelling it. But you just have to click your way past 2-3 screens worth of reminders of how amazing your subscription is and after that you’re done. Personally I would not call it hard (hard for me would be one of those services where I have to ring support to cancel!) but it could be easier.
I was definitely amazed by the refund part, that was nice and something I didn’t expect. Iirc the refund is also based on your actual usage of prime features, not just how much longer your subscription is going to last, which is extremely consumer-friendly.
I just cancelled Audible (an Amazon property) and the process was similarly confusing. In fact, it seemed to not even allow me to cancel unless I used my credits first. So I had to go purchase a book with my final credits and then come back to the cancellation page. Then after clicking through some non-obvious buttons to cancel, it gave me one last button that I almost clicked because they made it seem like it was a confirmation button. But it was actually a button meant to undo my cancellation. Very dark pattern.
This is where RBI's (central bank of India) e-mandate regulations are very useful, Now Amazon has to route the subscription (recurring-payments) to the issuer (bank) with explicit permission from the subscriber which are authenticated using MFA, Deductions for subscription are informed 24 hours prior by bank SMS with a cancellation link for the e-mandate. For amount > INR 5000 MFA is required for every subscription transaction.
So if I want to cancel the payment to Amazon Prime subscription, All I have to do is click the link from the bank's SMS. The only drawback for now is that not all international services adhere to this e-mandate regulations and so automatic subscription payments is impossible for such services (One time payment would still work).
I am surprised that Amazon had the gall to call this project "Iliad". I am even more surprised that anyone could consider a design decision anything else than intentional. Dark patterns are by definition intentional. Is this a question that courts or legislators are struggling with? Surely this is beyond any reasonable doubt.
You can easily statistics-wash your reasoning into something that seems at first glance beneficial. If I remember Pinterest's blog post about their nag-screen correctly, the argument would go something like this:
- We continuously improve the UX of our services using an empirical, data-driven approach.
- One of the KPIs we optimize for is retention of Prime customers.
- Our A/B tests showed that the changes introduced by Iliad significantly improved the retention rate.
- Therefore we decided to roll-out the changes globally, so our whole userbase can benefit from the improvements.
It's still intentionally introducing a dark pattern, but you don't have to use any ugly words anymore when taking about it...
A paperclip maximizer would at least have a supportable goal. I don't think that's the case here.
A lot of the rethoric around "data-driven UX" just pretends that the company's goals are always perfectly aligned with the customers' - when of course in reality, they are often completely at odds.
This makes it easy to talk about "improvements" and "optimisations" and make it seem like those changes would be in the interest of the users - when in reality, the changes are primarily improvements for the company.
E.g. "retention" is really a poor proxy for user satisfaction. Yes, a user can stay because they like the service. They can also stay because they haven't yet found what they were looking for, because they don't know how to unsubscribe or because they are addicted. Retention doesn't care.
However, what retention is a very good indicator of is how well a user can be monetized. I think, the fact that after so many years, retention is still one of the primary KPIs shows pretty well how serious the talk about "user satisfaction" really is.
Someone, an author I think, but I can't recall who, asserted that all dystopian stories are built on taking a simple rule and just following it to its horrible conclusion.
The simpler the rule the more corner cases it ignores, and those 'corners' are real human beings.
Nothing is more dystopian fodder than reducing a decision to pure numbers, and ignoring your instincts and feelings and looking at the numbers instead is literally built into Amazon's mantra. The only surprise is how long they've managed to maintain an illusion of being benign.
Internal project code names are sometimes sarcastic, and are never meant for public consumption. It's obviously embarrassing the way it's presented, but it's not like someone was sitting around twirling their mustache plotting something evil.
Here's a more charitable interpretation to consider:
"We have worked hard to make Prime a good deal for customers. But we also know that a lot of customers don't know about the benefits. They just know that if they sign up for Prime they can get free shipping. So they do so and then they cancel. Are we sure that customers know about all the benefits that they get from Prime before they cancel? Maybe if they did, they would not be so hasty. Do they know about Music and Photos and Video? Maybe if they did, they'd keep it around. Let's show them the options during the cancellation flow to make sure they REALLY know what they're giving up. And let's flip around the yes/no buttons to make sure they actually read it - similar to what security confirmation messages do when you're about to do something irreversible."
Microsoft did a similar thing with XBOX live in the past. Someone had improved the UI for cancelling, and when that went live an increase in cancellations was immediately noticed by management, who then ordered that the feature be reverted.
“To cancel your membership please send an email to $larger_factor@amazon.com, where $larger_factor is the largest prime factor of 25195908475657893494027183240048398571429282126204032027777137836043662020707595556264018525880784406918290641249515082189298559149176184502808489120072844992687392807287776735971418347270261896375014971824691165077613379859095700097330459748808428401797429100642458691817195118746121515172654632282216869987549182422433637259085141865462043576798423387184774447920739934236584823824281198163815010674810451660377306056201619676256133844143603833904414952634432190114657544454178424020924616515723350778707749817125772467962926386356373289912154831438167899885040445364023527381951378636564391212010397122822120720357“
Not sure if they do this, but: I signed up for prime for free, forgot to cancel, and got billed. I cancelled when I saw the charge, and then instead keeping my subscription for 1 year (or month, I don't remember), Amazon actually refunded me. Yeah they had a bunch of dark patterns, but that refund was a pleasant surprise. Hope they still do that.
> Yeah they had a bunch of dark patterns, but that refund was a pleasant surprise. Hope they still do that.
The pessimist in me suspects they only do this to minimise the number of people who go on to complain to regulators and minimise the amount of legislative scrutiny they have to face.
Pessimist in you optimistically assumes there’s legislative scrutiny for them to face.
I would argue it’s actually an optimistic thing: there’s either legislative scrutiny OR Amazon isn’t managed exclusively by assholes, either way it’s an optimistic outcome.
I had the same issue with other software that, after making a valid attempt to cancel, I ended up shutting off the money from the credit card. That worked.
Wierdly the aspect of this story that most annoys me is that they named the project Illiad. The Illiad was about the Trojan War. The project should have been named Odyssey after Odysseus's long and trying journey trying to get home after the war. That is the parallel to this project, the story about a seemingly easy goal that turns out to be much more diffucult and take longer than expected, not the story about the actual war.
This actually just reminded me to cancel. It wasn't super pleasant, but I was surprised to discover that I got the remainder of the year refunded to me without having to ask. So dark patterns aside, I thought that was pretty nice.
> Since you have not used your Amazon Prime benefits, we are refunding you $129.26 which includes the full membership fee and any applicable fees and taxes.
The FTC has been pushing back against "click to subscribe, call to cancel". Back in October, they released a statement against such practices, warning that they "may be illegal" or something along those lines (I can't find a good source and forget the details). From what I understand, it was a somewhat soft statement meant to serve as a warning against this dark pattern, indicating that companies may be legally liable, but not outright banning the practice. It read more like a warning shot to get companies to shape up or face stricter regulation.
I wish they would take a harder stand. If you've got one-click signup and don't have one-click cancel (fine, maybe you can add in a confirmation click, or even an immediate email with a confirmation link it it), you should be fined enough to make it hurt. $10k per impacted user or whatever.
The Economist still follows this dark pattern and it's pissing me off. I signed up for their print + digital, realized their digital content sucks, and now that I'm not commuting on mass transit anymore, I don't read the magazine enough to justify a subscription. A year later it auto-renewed because they require a phone call to cancel and I get sick of waiting on hold.
I really hope this happens in Canada as well. There's a trend of these subscription services (coffee, food boxes, cat litter, etc.) that make it impossible to cancel without calling, chatting or emailing. Worse than that, they don't let you cancel, but they will suspend the service for x months. Even worse than that, they don't even allow you to remove your credit card without contacting them which really should be against some consumer protection laws. How can they keep my credit card info and not allow me to easily delete it?
Worse than that, they don't let you cancel, but they will suspend the service for x months
Strangely, Netflix has gone in the opposite direction. At least in the U.S.
Pre-pandemic, I used to occasionally put my Netflix DVD account on hold for a month or two when I would be traveling. It was no big deal.
This past summer, I needed to put it on hold again, and that's no longer an option. Instead, you can only cancel the account now. Netflix holds on to your queue for six months in case you change your mind and sign up again, which worked a lot better than I thought it would.
I guess Netflix has proactive lawyers and human beings for managers, instead of whatever kind Amazon has.
Netflix wants out of physical media. They're hoping you forget to sign up again, and, when you remember, realize your queue has disappeared and decide not to renew.
Would changing the subscription to a card that's about the expire work to stop the charges? Or changing it to a "virtual card" number and then canceling the card?
I'm not advocating for scamming any service provider but in this case I'd have to assume that an invalid payment would automatically cancel the subscription.
This ought to work, and I wouldn't consider it a scam in the case of a subscription service. Payment fails, cancel subscription, everyone's [moderately] happy. If you're using it to get out of services-already-rendered, that's scammy, I suppose, but if it's a service you didn't want and weren't using and would have cancelled if they didn't make it impossible, then screw them.
I pay monthly for a Digital Ocean VPS. I get charged at the end of the month, based on my usage, for services already provided. Trying to weasel out of that would be unethical. But the Economist charges me in advance, for an annual subscription, that I would have cancelled if they didn't make it impossible. I have no problem with changing that payment method to a dead card so that the next renewal attempt fails. I don't think that's unethical at all, and because they're doing evil things, I wouldn't feel bad even if they did suffer in some way.
"Click to subscribe, call to cancel" is illegal in California. If you can get a company to believe that you're a Californian, either by giving them a different address and/or by using a VPN based in CA, their site will magically change from a snakepit of dark pattern BS to one that provides one-click cancellation. (And if it doesn't, they're breaking the law.)
Your comment makes it seem like the article is placing Amazon in the "click to subscribe, call to cancel" category.
It doesn't, and they aren't. "1 click to subscribe, 3 clicks to cancel" is hardly a burden, and it shouldn't be implied that it's in any way comparable to what the NYT/The Economist/etc do.
The Kindle has a huge dark pattern where to turn off the wifi to save the battery life, you have to turn ON Airplane mode. There is no labeled wifi switch. I am sure it is so they can keep the screen saver home page advertisement up to date.
While this is a part of the terrible UI/UX of the Kindle, I highly doubt it is for keeping the ad up to date as it this is also the way it exists on ad-free Kindles. Kindle have just always had fairly poor interface decisions.
I cancelled the other month on impulse, to see if I'd miss it.
The initial wording implied that by cancelling I'd be giving up the remaining duration I had already paid for. After closing that window and starting the process again, I got different wording that made it clear I would keep access until the renewal date. Scumbags.
I really wonder which effects this kind of user-hostile behavior has on the long term success of a company. This is probably impossible to measure since there is no second Amazon to compare with. I guess some execs were asked or incentivized to optimize one particular metric (number of Prime cancellations), and this is exactly what they did.
Having a link or ability to cancel online (even with strange language or hard to navigate) is still better than cancelling your Comcast or newspaper/ESPN subscription.
What's the latest in virtual credit card numbers? I've seen these services advertised, but I haven't tried one yet.
I'd love to be able to "cancel" a subscription service by just deleting my card and stopping automated payments.
It would be nice if I was then not legally obligated to pay any outstanding bills, but I doubt I would win that fight, so I question how good these cards are in practice.
Privacy works, but you should be aware that without attempting to cancel on the service, some providers get really angry. I tried and failed to cancel NYT, and they force-posted [0] a subscription renewal despite getting declines on the card. In other words, it didn't matter that the card was paused or that they didn't get authorization, they still tried to post the transaction. I don't necessarily expect this from every service, but it certainly wasn't as painless as I thought it was going to be with a virtual card number.
Ah, great to know that the merchants have another tool to take whatever money they feel entitled to from my account based on nothing more than "but we really really want to!" My first introduction to credit cards, when I was a kid, was via some.. uh.. shared CC numbers online. I couldn't believe how insecure the whole system was. Were people just that naive back in the day?
Most services will just give up trying to charge you and cancel your subscription after a few failed attempts, but I had a bad experience with BritBox a few years ago. I signed up for a trial with a Revolut card that barely had any balance and forgot to cancel, and then to my surprise when the trial ended a "delayed transaction" appeared in Revolut, and they overdrafted me. There was absolutely no mention of this when signing up for the trial, I only saw a $0 authorization charge.
I've used Capital One's virtual card service many times to close a card associated with a service that would've otherwise required me to chat or call someone to cancel. It's worked extremely well.
Fnb, a South African bank, has these as part of their offering for free. I use them for all new paid services. They're easy to create, block and delete and just fantastic for this sort n of thing
When I canceled, a prompt came up that said something which made me feel like I was an idiot for canceling. Something like "Are you sure you want to miss out on all the great benefits of prime?" [YES/NO].
When I pressed yes, I felt like I had to buy into their premise that prime offered me great value...which made me feel like a fool.
Honestly, I am more entertained by the psychological manipulation of the corporations than anything at this point. Last week I bought a water bottle at a chain supermarket with a sticker on it that read, "We want to be your friend! Follow us on Facebook." I just laughed at the thought that a water bottle is trying to befriend me on behalf of a corporation.
This is absolutely generic common practice, to one degree or another. Facebook is great at this crap. Clearly this example crosses some kind of line to people. But maybe more than anything because we got to see how the sausage is made. It's as open a secret as the fact that automated call handling is about intentional friction to limit needed call staff.
Adobe is masterful at this. I actually laughed at the dark patterns. These people are DISGUSTING... They may see an increase in some metrics, but I'm convinced this kind of behavior is damaging to the brand: after going through the process with Adobe, I made a very big memory note: NEVER BUY NOTHING FROM THIS COMPANY.
Hard same. Adobe cheated me out of around six hundred pounds by making it freaking impossible to cancel.
I finally escaped in 2021, after being devoted to Adobe for 16 years. I will never buy anything from them again. It's over now. I do miss Photoshop and After Effects but nothing is worth that nightmarish hassle. Da Vinci, Affinity, Fusion, Smoke... there are other options.
Amazon love to talk about being “customer-obsessed”, but this little slip of the mask is pretty stark evidence of the opposite: that they have contempt for their customers and simply see them as cash cows to milk.
Maybe most people won’t care, but this has put me off subscribing to any Amazon service in future.
Uhhh, what part of "customer-obsessed" implies anything positive to you? Drug dealers are also "customer-obsessed". Notice how Amazon is customer-obsessed and not "obsessed with providing a great, ethical, and non-addictive experience for our customers". They are upfront that they will do anything and everything to acquire more customers and extract as much from each customer as possible. This has been clear to anyone for at least half of a decade
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 282 ms ] threadWe're better off coming up with our own solution(s). Or at least trying.
I went away back to Spotify, where I pay for a thing and get that thing (even if they keep insisting I listen to their podcasts too).
Presumably. The article doesn't mention anything about Amazon changing their policies as a result of being called out. But my experience was certainly not what was described in the article- basically a single button click.
Big fat edit: OK, I was wrong. This article and the other comments here made me go double check and sure enough, the cancellation didn't go through. Perhaps I fell prey to a dark pattern, but I seem to remember seeing different pages. Maybe an A/B test. Either way, good timing on posting this article!
I mean it’s ok if you read everything expecting it to be a horrible process. There’s a lot of “if” you cancel instead of you “have” cancelled that provide hints you aren’t done yet.
Fuck Amazon.
I was prepared for a dark pattern fight, I was not disappointed!
Yeah, the way they make Prime work and affordable for them is to locate warehouses everywhere, close to recipients. People have been observing 2-day non-Prime delivery times for years now. They'll also usually offer you a month-long free Prime trial once a year and you can do a batch of holiday shopping or whatever.
The dark patterns on cancelling my subscription were so disgustingly manipulative that it made it really easy to be happy with my decision to leave, though. I admit to feeling a tinge of regret when I quit a service that politely allows me to cancel because that actually gives me some respect for the service. With Amazon, Spotify, Facebook, and Instagram, they try SO hard to make it impossible to leave that it cemented the decision completely in my mind and eroded the last bit of respect I had for those platforms.
I've had prime for quite a while, and I still get this for some items... But they're usually upfront about it and say the expected delivery is in X days before I complete the order.
As a non prime member they make it hard to buy things too, with extra screens trying to offer you another trial for a week for 99p and always defaulting to offering that and paid delivery.
For me, Prime is way too expensive, i don't want there crappy video streaming service.
Target, Home Depot, and Costco are currently upping their delivery game as well.
Amazon is huge, no doubting that, but has nothing close to a monopoly for online shopping. Competitors have really amped up in the last year or two.
But sometimes I want to order something for less and I just put it in the cart or get it elsewhere.
Yes, I may have a problem.
“6% Cash Back at U.S. supermarkets on up to $6,000 per year in purchases (then 1%). ” Blue Cash Preferred® Card from American Express which Whole Foods accepts.
Which is to say most Walmart stores, or a more liberal interpretation "plebs need not apply". Though I found out it does work with the pick-up option, but I absolutely loathe not being able to look at what I'm buying.
At Amazon? No. But with two cards I get:
Grocery: 3%
Gas: 2%
Restaurants: 3-4.5% [0]
Travel: 3-4.5%
And I'm not even trying all that hard... There's entire groups dedicated to min-maxing this stuff that can probably blow the above right out of the water.
[0] Depends on how I redeem the points.
$139 / .03 = $4,633
I mean, this is exactly the type of math you should do to evaluate options like this. No controversy here. If you're spending more than that anyway, it makes sense to get the Prime card. Anything you spend beyond that amount is earning you more than the non-Prime card, and that's even just flat out valuing Prime at $0 and treating it as a fee.
I sometimes get the trial to ship something to my parents. It literally tells you that your trial will immediately end…. Only for it to not.
It’s like they considered it at one point then decided not to but forgot to remove the wording.
So you're abusing a trial to get something for free that actually costs the company money.
But then you complain that the company tries hard to keep you from cancelling the trial? How does that make any sense?
You are well within your ethical rights to take advantage of a trial offer. And the company is well within their ethical rights to try to convince you to stay. Three clicks online to cancel is hardly a burden.
It is not "abuse" to use the offer as stated. If they keep offering it, then that's on them.
And regardless of my use, they are not "well within their ethical rights" to outright lie to their customers in an attempt to convince them to stay.
"Wouldn't you rather enjoy the many benefits Prime offers you?" [YES] [NO]
"Are you sure you won't miss those benefits?" [YES] [NO]
Are you sure you wish to leave Prime? You may be consigning your soul to eternal perdition!
[Return to Bezos the Blessed] [No, I wish to spend hereafter in the lake of fire]
We understand, maybe you aren't spiritual. That's okay! We value your business regardless. But you should consider that Jeff Bezos is a powerful billionaire that may one day bring about the Singularity and become Roko's Basilisk. We're not fucking around here, and we're upping the stakes: Some gods may be merciful, but Roko Bezos is not one of them
[Spend no money outside the Amazon ecosystem ever again] [Consign an endless number of sentient emulated versions of yourself to an emulated lake of fire]
"Do you often sing or whistle just for fun?"
*Annulation Lever Activated - do you wish to continue? Engage STOP lever to continue. Engage CONTINUE lever to stop."
• "Do you really want a hint?"
• "You really should try to solve this on your own. Still want a hint?"
• "Wouldn't it be more fun to figure it out by yourself?"
• "Last chance to be a hero. Still want that hint?"
(The game is playable online at: https://archive.org/details/ScarabOfRaMacintosh, or using https://mace.software/scarab-of-ra/ on modern MacOS -- you can trigger these dialogs by picking any item from the "Hints" menu.)
Even for Amazon, too many of these can cause issues.
Now imagine how it is for those less familiar with letters. How many folks only notice they've a Prime subscription when the montly bank statement arrives?
It's a shame. I used to think so highly of Amazon.
We should take this completely out of companies' hands. The incentives are too perverse and too prevalent for anything good to come out of playing dark pattern whack-a-mole through legislation or, worse, "promoting dark pattern awareness" or some other brand of blame-dodging hogwash. Companies are stealing money and getting away with it. We have the technology to stop them. We should stop them.
I suspect the easiest way to do it would be to give credit card company cancellation buttons legal bite: unless someone signs physical papers and does credit checks (e.g. for housing and utilities), nonpayment must be respected as a request to cancel and not creatively misinterpreted as an invitation to extend credit, charge fees, and accumulate interest.
But they'll never take that leap of faith absent a law mandating it. There's not enough competition between the major issuing networks.
Right now, they can't, because they have no privileged way to cancel a service on the user's behalf. They can withhold payment, yes, but under current consumer contract law withholding payment doesn't imply cancellation. We should change the law so that it does. Once the law changes, they would implement "cancel buttons" and "subscription management" so fast your head would spin -- and then they would flood TV and youtube with ads about it, and they would bug you every time you logged into your CC statement for the next year.
... the way to do it would be to disincentivize subscription companies from having credit card companies involved in cancellations.
(1) Pass laws to empower credit card companies to cancel services on a user's behalf, if the user so requests + (2) Allow CC companies to collect a fee from the subscription service when they do so.
CC companies will implement the feature as a profit source, but subscription services will also be incentivized to flow cancellations through themselves (because it's cheaper) thus leading to more streamlined cancellation.
I've done this to the NHL, Comcast, Sirius, Uber, etc. Considering some places don't even offer a way to contact support (Uber), chargebacks are the only way to handle this sometimes.
I’d love to hear your strategy.
> "But I already do it" (paraphrasing)
Not legally. If you hit "Agree" on a contract that says you will pay until cancel and then you stop paying without canceling, you're still legally on the hook for the payment. Technically. Most companies won't actually send you to collections. But they can, and sometimes they do, which is why credit card companies can't make GUIs to bring your subscriptions front and center with nice user friendly "cancel" buttons. Sometimes they still try to do this, but behind the scenes someone has to cancel on your behalf so it isn't reliable.
Upgrading your strategy from "technically illegal" to "legal and normal" is how we bring it to the masses :)
Are they? I think that those companies misunderstand how easy it is to lose trust and how difficult it is to gain it. Humans are extremely good at remembering who can be trusted.
I'm not a Prime member and it feels like I'm being tricked into becoming one whenever I've placed an order. I'll probably suffer with higher prices or slower delivery for some things but I can only tolerate these sorts of things for so long.
Amazon never changed. You did.
It wasn’t until the second or third panel where I found a statement (in the smallest text size possible) that told me services would stay active until previously-billed time ran out.
I use burner virtual cards, through privacy.com. This way, I can terminate my card instead of having to deal with the nonsense that cancellation has become.
This might have some repercussions, such as account terminations, however, I only use this method on websites that I have disposable accounts with. It is well worth my time to keep using virtual cards for as long as these dark patterns exist.
i.e. they'd been charged 0.00/mo on X date every month while working for that org and then they checked after quitting and noticed it was set to auto-renew on the next date for the full price.
They didn't get any kind of notification about it beforehand. Canceling that was apparently the same kind of affair as this.
I guess part of it comes down to their ex-org's bug surrounding how a dogfooding prod subscription is granted/revoked but in the end they were treated just like a real customer.
I kind of wonder if they have an algorithm to check your purchase history and if you've given Amazon enough profit over the years (which I certainly have with over 23 years of purchases and at least 15 years of prime) then it just makes the cancellation a piece of cake.
I was definitely amazed by the refund part, that was nice and something I didn’t expect. Iirc the refund is also based on your actual usage of prime features, not just how much longer your subscription is going to last, which is extremely consumer-friendly.
So if I want to cancel the payment to Amazon Prime subscription, All I have to do is click the link from the bank's SMS. The only drawback for now is that not all international services adhere to this e-mandate regulations and so automatic subscription payments is impossible for such services (One time payment would still work).
- We continuously improve the UX of our services using an empirical, data-driven approach.
- One of the KPIs we optimize for is retention of Prime customers.
- Our A/B tests showed that the changes introduced by Iliad significantly improved the retention rate.
- Therefore we decided to roll-out the changes globally, so our whole userbase can benefit from the improvements.
It's still intentionally introducing a dark pattern, but you don't have to use any ugly words anymore when taking about it...
A lot of the rethoric around "data-driven UX" just pretends that the company's goals are always perfectly aligned with the customers' - when of course in reality, they are often completely at odds.
This makes it easy to talk about "improvements" and "optimisations" and make it seem like those changes would be in the interest of the users - when in reality, the changes are primarily improvements for the company.
E.g. "retention" is really a poor proxy for user satisfaction. Yes, a user can stay because they like the service. They can also stay because they haven't yet found what they were looking for, because they don't know how to unsubscribe or because they are addicted. Retention doesn't care.
However, what retention is a very good indicator of is how well a user can be monetized. I think, the fact that after so many years, retention is still one of the primary KPIs shows pretty well how serious the talk about "user satisfaction" really is.
The simpler the rule the more corner cases it ignores, and those 'corners' are real human beings.
Nothing is more dystopian fodder than reducing a decision to pure numbers, and ignoring your instincts and feelings and looking at the numbers instead is literally built into Amazon's mantra. The only surprise is how long they've managed to maintain an illusion of being benign.
Because it sends the customer on a trip that takes forever because of luring sirens, amongst other traps?
Here's a more charitable interpretation to consider:
"We have worked hard to make Prime a good deal for customers. But we also know that a lot of customers don't know about the benefits. They just know that if they sign up for Prime they can get free shipping. So they do so and then they cancel. Are we sure that customers know about all the benefits that they get from Prime before they cancel? Maybe if they did, they would not be so hasty. Do they know about Music and Photos and Video? Maybe if they did, they'd keep it around. Let's show them the options during the cancellation flow to make sure they REALLY know what they're giving up. And let's flip around the yes/no buttons to make sure they actually read it - similar to what security confirmation messages do when you're about to do something irreversible."
I nearly got stung by the same trap on ShutterStock a few weeks back.
The pessimist in me suspects they only do this to minimise the number of people who go on to complain to regulators and minimise the amount of legislative scrutiny they have to face.
I would argue it’s actually an optimistic thing: there’s either legislative scrutiny OR Amazon isn’t managed exclusively by assholes, either way it’s an optimistic outcome.
Yet, you also have my condolences. It is not fun...
> Since you have not used your Amazon Prime benefits, we are refunding you $129.26 which includes the full membership fee and any applicable fees and taxes.
Seems fair to me
I decided to go with it for a shampoo, the delivery is so irregular it’s not even worth it.
Do you know what it’s like not having shampoo because your clown ass decided to wait on Bezos?
I wish they would take a harder stand. If you've got one-click signup and don't have one-click cancel (fine, maybe you can add in a confirmation click, or even an immediate email with a confirmation link it it), you should be fined enough to make it hurt. $10k per impacted user or whatever.
Here's a random not-great article about it: https://www.birminghamtimes.com/2021/11/ftc-cracks-down-on-c....
The Economist still follows this dark pattern and it's pissing me off. I signed up for their print + digital, realized their digital content sucks, and now that I'm not commuting on mass transit anymore, I don't read the magazine enough to justify a subscription. A year later it auto-renewed because they require a phone call to cancel and I get sick of waiting on hold.
Strangely, Netflix has gone in the opposite direction. At least in the U.S.
Pre-pandemic, I used to occasionally put my Netflix DVD account on hold for a month or two when I would be traveling. It was no big deal.
This past summer, I needed to put it on hold again, and that's no longer an option. Instead, you can only cancel the account now. Netflix holds on to your queue for six months in case you change your mind and sign up again, which worked a lot better than I thought it would.
I guess Netflix has proactive lawyers and human beings for managers, instead of whatever kind Amazon has.
I'm not advocating for scamming any service provider but in this case I'd have to assume that an invalid payment would automatically cancel the subscription.
I pay monthly for a Digital Ocean VPS. I get charged at the end of the month, based on my usage, for services already provided. Trying to weasel out of that would be unethical. But the Economist charges me in advance, for an annual subscription, that I would have cancelled if they didn't make it impossible. I have no problem with changing that payment method to a dead card so that the next renewal attempt fails. I don't think that's unethical at all, and because they're doing evil things, I wouldn't feel bad even if they did suffer in some way.
It doesn't, and they aren't. "1 click to subscribe, 3 clicks to cancel" is hardly a burden, and it shouldn't be implied that it's in any way comparable to what the NYT/The Economist/etc do.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
The initial wording implied that by cancelling I'd be giving up the remaining duration I had already paid for. After closing that window and starting the process again, I got different wording that made it clear I would keep access until the renewal date. Scumbags.
Sadly.
I'd love to be able to "cancel" a subscription service by just deleting my card and stopping automated payments.
It would be nice if I was then not legally obligated to pay any outstanding bills, but I doubt I would win that fight, so I question how good these cards are in practice.
Has anyone tried one?
[0]: https://support.privacy.com/hc/en-us/articles/360012288214-F...
https://www.fnb.co.za/promotions/PBVirtualCard/index.html
When I pressed yes, I felt like I had to buy into their premise that prime offered me great value...which made me feel like a fool.
Honestly, I am more entertained by the psychological manipulation of the corporations than anything at this point. Last week I bought a water bottle at a chain supermarket with a sticker on it that read, "We want to be your friend! Follow us on Facebook." I just laughed at the thought that a water bottle is trying to befriend me on behalf of a corporation.
"Welcome to Costco, I love you." inbound.
I finally escaped in 2021, after being devoted to Adobe for 16 years. I will never buy anything from them again. It's over now. I do miss Photoshop and After Effects but nothing is worth that nightmarish hassle. Da Vinci, Affinity, Fusion, Smoke... there are other options.
Maybe most people won’t care, but this has put me off subscribing to any Amazon service in future.