I was unwittingly signed up for Amazon Music Unlimited
Got a doozy of a dark pattern from Amazon today. I'm not sure that my order is relevant, but I ordered a cheap clip contact microphone for a tuner. I placed the order and received the confirmation email as expected, but I also received a "Welcome to Amazon Music Unlimited" email as well. I assume I left some box checked or something that I failed to opt out of, but I never saw it. This was a 90 day trial after which it would charge me $9/month. I immediately went to cancel and then got several "are you sure" dialogs with up-sells and confusingly designed buttons to try and get me to keep the service (or even sign up for a higher charged one).
I have to say that although Amazon has fallen quite far in my estimation in the last few years, this is something else - it feels like they'll be hocking magazine subscriptions at me next.
Keep an eye on your subscriptions and credit cards - and I'll be canceling my Prime membership of over a decade. I was on the fence and have been meaning to, but this seals it.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 72.0 ms ] threadThe rent, by the way, was more than half the purchase price.
They needed a product that was distributed exclusively through Amazon. So they logged in, added the product to their cart, and then checked out.
At checkout it presented them the "Get free shipping with Prime" prompt, which he says he couldn't find any way past it without signing up.
He only realised he'd signed up for a subscription service when it started sending him emails about other things. He cancelled immediately, and swears he won't buy anything through Amazon again.
- Checking out, it defaults to paying extra for shipping, with a big option that says "free shipping with prime". The option you want, the standard basic free shipping, is the least conspicuous one.
- The Prime 30 day (free) / 1 week ($2) trials are quite pushy at each checkout, and the option to avoid them doesn't even look like a UI button compared to the highlighted "accept" bit.
- I've seen "get it $soon if you order within $short_time, where the deadline expires just to get reset a few more hours in the future (and $soon stays the same). So they're not telling you the actual shipping cutoff, but some fake thing to induce stress.
- The link to cancel Prime is disguised within a FAQ, including an extra sentence that tries to misdirect you into settings, where the option to cancel Prime does not actually exist.
- Actually cancelling Prime is its own minefield of multiple screens where the option you want is deemphasized, repeated like three times.
About the only honest policy of theirs I've found is that when you get one of those 30 day free trials, you can cancel it ASAP, enjoy fewer dark patterns for a month, and not have to remember to cancel later. I usually do this and get my fill of stuff from Amazon though, at least until I find something that Amazon actually has the best deal on a year later, and they offer me another free trial as I checkout.
Only to then find someone else‘s notes starting on page 13.
Seems dark patterns are not enough anymore, and they opt now for outright fraud.
In this way when your order Acme Widget A from vendor X you could be randomly getting stock from vendor C's items (which are knock offs), Vendor "acme"'s items which are the actual company items or vendor Z's items which they have setup to toss back into their stock from returns with little if any checking).
This optimization provides warehouse "leveling" allowing Amazon to ship local products faster without needing to ensure each vendor splits tock or shipping via warehouse/warehouse but obviously builds in a huge carrot to game the system for vendors and makes it hard to have checks that identify the actual problem vendors.
Full disclosure: ex-employee of Amazon Music, left voluntarily.
I got burned by Apple deleting even my own personal recordings a decade or so ago, so I simply do not trust such "services" anymore.
Popular music by definition is popular because… well a lot of people like it.
And so they make services/devices catering to that large population of people.
Just because people like things that are mainstream doesn’t make them boring
And a lot of people "like it" because it is pushed aggresively by the record companies. A lot of the so called "Popular music" is garbage you won't hear of after a couple of years.
https://www.amazon.com/print-magazine-subscriptions/b?ie=UTF...
I have been expecting something new and underhanded but haven't seen it yet. I'm not paranoid enough not to take advantage.
But Amazon is always my last choice now. They're not the only one who clearly has algorithms to try to encourage long time customers who rarely order.
Cancel immediately after you sign up; you still get the 30 days for free.
The UI on the amazon music Android app is so bad, I'm cancelling it and going over to spotify though. When you open the app you just get a blank screen with a progress bar displaying 0:00 to 0:00.
The search is not friendly, for example I searched for "the long way home", I got many results for one Norah Jones song of that name, but no result for Supertramp's "take the long way home". Also when I play a search result, I don't want it to go through multiple results of the same song and play them all.
At least they fixed the bug where you'd google a book and the direct link from google went to a 404.