> harmed by their deceptive Prime enrollment practices
I'm still confused by this part.
I didn't use Prime for a long time. I remember lots of buttons inviting me to sign up, just like YouTube asks me weekly if I want to subscribe to premium.
But I don't remember anything seemingly deceptive, and none of the news articles seem to actually provide any details. So what precisely was deceptive?
And even the cancellation part, it's just two confirmation screens. It doesn't seem bad. It honestly seems about the same as any other website subscription I've ever had. You click to cancel, say yes I really don't want the benefits (this is the only extra step), and then click to confirm the cancellation.
It's a very "Thank You Dear Leader" of our current regime. Also look at them wanting huge picture of him in Washington on various buildings much like Mao/Stalin/Ayatollah etc always liked
Generally a fan of Prime. I’ll admit the shipping is pretty addictive. The rest of Prime is pretty meh. It’s a good deal on shipping and then a bunch of second-rate other stuff tacked on.
On both .com and AWS, Amazon is reaching a stage of maturity where they’re running out of new customers. While still a fan of both, they’re both getting annoying as innovation slows and they get more annoying with a focus on doing things to make your use “sticky” vs making you trip over yourself to buy something because it’s great.
Amazon is full of counterfeit or low quality junk that one needs to navigate. AWS is muddling things with far too many random services thrown at the wall vs just being really good at a few core things. In today competitive environment account teams can’t really explain why we should use AWS apart from “we’re AWS” which is again an answer from a company aging into more stagnating maturity.
The fine, while more than a rounding error, is still small. However it will hopefully help cut down on some of Amazon’s more annoying behaviors.
A few years ago, I got a new phone and a new number. I eventually went to Amazon, entered password, and then was prompted for the OTP, which was sent to my previous number (which I no longer had access to). I kept trying things until I was completely locked out of the account. I emailed them, no help. So, while being locked out of my account, I couldn't cancel my subscription to Kindle (lost all of the books, too). I just kept getting charged month after month (of which I'd just forget about it after getting angry for a minute).
I'd hope that they fixed this. If an account is locked, it seems like it would be common sense to place a hold on any subscriptions associated with it.
Amazon is bad, but as others note, it’s insultingly transparent more than anything. But the worst in my recent history is Duolingo. Constant pestering to upgrade your subscription, fine, but once you do, it frequently “forgets” the subscription (through the App Store) and goes back to nagging you, only fixed by digging a few screens into the profile and tapping “restore purchases”. Bigger issue when your family is using it and doesn’t understand you’re already subscribed. Paid for two family subscriptions this way.
I cancelled Prime last year after getting fed up with Amazon in several ways. Bringing ads to Prime Video was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
I do still end up ordering from time to time, and the checkout process for non-Prime members is horrific. Multiple Prime sign-up offers that I always need to carefully read so I don’t click the wrong thing, illogical default shipping options, with more tricks to try and get the user to sign up for Prime while choosing shipping, after having already declined multiple times.
I don’t know why any non-Prime customer would want to sign up for Prime after such a user-hostile experience full of dark patterns.
I graphed out my orders since the start of my Amazon account. There was a steady uptrend over 20 years, with yearly growth since 2018. All of that ended 2023. My orders fell off a cliff, dropping by 60% in 2024. The treatment of non-Prime customers isn’t winning me back, it’s pushing me further away. I think my goal for 2026 will be not to order anything from Amazon. It’s been such a bad experience. Apparently their goal of being the world’s most customer-centric company only applies to Prime users.
I hope this judgement will get them to change their ways, but I’m assuming they will do as little as possible to comply, and still pushing Prime hard.
As a non-US based customer, I can totally relate. Even though prime is not really applicable to me (in terms of free shipping, a small selection of the media libary, etc), I'm still getting pushed to try Prime each time I try to shop at Amazon.
The main problem is that unless it's a specific brand store, with products sold and shipped by Amazon, all the other products are pure junk. I can easily find them on AliExpress with much lower prices.
I have similar experiences though a different usage graph. My shipping peaks were college (textbooks and college needs/wants) and early in owning my own home. After that point I didn't need as much delivered, so many of my purchases had moved digital (books, music, videogames) or back to retail stores. I realized late in 2020 that the only two Amazon purchases I made that year (in 2020!, with quarantines and lockdowns and it being weird to visit physical stores, I still made more retail store purchases than Amazon purchases) were inconsequential and neither of them shipped as Prime delivery because all of them I took a discount to wait a week for (because there wasn't any rush).
In the meantime I was fed up with Prime Video and wondering why I was paying for it.
Between the dark patterns cancelling Prime and the many dark patterns trying to get you to join Prime I also stopped feeling like a welcome customer of large sections of Amazon's website and have gone even more back to boring old retail stores. My biggest remaining relationship with Amazon is because of the kindle, but their worsening DRM decisions do keep me wondering if I need to explore another ecosystem despite kindle's hardware advantages (including the possibly sunk cost that I invested in too much kindle hardware).
Just for personal use, and not any sort of support for Amazon's business practices:
When you get a free (or cheaper than you're currently paying for shipping) Prime offer, you can accept it and then the second the order has gone through go into your account and cancel it and still get the remaining number of promotional days, as well as the benefits for the current order. It's a slightly annoying step, but I figure if they're going to be dumb enough to keep offering me free promotions I might as well take advantage of it.
I would like Amazon to be fined another Billion for not notifying customers about the annual renewal. They sneak the charge on to your credit card, and you have no easy way to find out what the charge is for.
When I worked there (more than a decade ago) senior leaders and old-timers were extremely proud of the fact that they did things like sending "your Prime membership will renew in (a month - I think) - be sure to cancel if you don't want it to" emails. This was quite different from typical subscription services providers at the time.
In fact, I had more than one old-timer mention that they would ask employment candidates about the Prime pricing and renewal strategy and that candidates who said something along the lines of "it's best for people to subscribe and then never use it so we make margin on the service revenue" (along the lines of gym business models) would be rejected.
They really wanted people to want to be Prime members (this was even before Bezos' famous "you'd be irresponsible not to be a Prime member" comment...)
That's impressive but man what an unfair hiring policy. A candidate is trying to guess corporate culture, makes the wrong guess, and then you reject them? It's a coin flip.
Isn't that most social culture? Expecting people to be psychic to your unspoken or vaguely hinted desires and then promoting people for telling you what you want to hear vs what you need to hear?
Amazon makes $50B per year from Prime, and there are an estimated 240 million subscribers. $10/user is an insanely cheap price for user acquisition (basically equivalent to a 1 month free deal), and any company will happily take this deal 10 times out of 10.
I don't really understand all the fuss about Amazon Prime.
I found it really easy to cancel. They even refunded me when I canceled my subscription after the free trial expired (forgot to cancel before that despite being notified).
Clicking passed the "look at what you will lose if you cancel" screen is not my idea of "hard".
Yes, they push for subscriptions, usually using promotional offers. It is called marketing, and Amazon is relatively mild in that regard.
Maybe it could create a precedent and make the majority of subscription services pay.
I moved my prime account to be on a family plan. Their systems sent me, IDK, 15 messages telling me my prime benefits were going away and to sign up. Either they completely do not cross validate that I had moved to another prime subscription, or, based off my read of this article, they really just wanted two people in the same household paying for prime for no reason.
For me prime still works fine most of the time. And so much random crap is overnight nowadays! Nothing like ordering a vent cap, finding it doesn't quite fit due to peculiar siding, and immediately returning and overnighting a different one for free. I just wish they'd pick up returns if they are rare enough, having to make a 10 minute stop to do it myself is completely unacceptable ;)
Our local parking authority (meter maids) just paid out a massive settlement (/s): each claimant gets four (4) twenty-five cent (25¢) parking credits (==$1.00), which expire within one month. They also raised parking rates by about that much, per hour.
They got me a little a couple of months ago. I had a free prime trial, then clicked cancel which was easy enough but it didn't cancel because I didn't notice after cancel there was an 'are you sure you really want to cancel' which I missed. Such is the way of the game I guess.
I genuinely can't fathom these numbers. As in: it could be $25B or $250M and it would mean the same to me.
Does this materially impact Amazon?
I'm (really) not a fan of Amazon, but to me that's an existential amount of money. I don't think I've ever worked anywhere where that kind of money wouldn't be a "ok, I guess we're closing down, turn off the lights when you leave" situation, and I've worked at some large companies.
I'm not usually exposed to financials I guess but my burn rate for my last (very small) company was about $4-5M/y roughly. This amount of money would keep us all gainfully employed for about 500 years.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 63.2 ms ] thread> and cease unlawful enrollment and cancellation practices for Prime.
which thank god, Amazon deserves to be in the hall of fame for their multiple beg screens.
I'm still confused by this part.
I didn't use Prime for a long time. I remember lots of buttons inviting me to sign up, just like YouTube asks me weekly if I want to subscribe to premium.
But I don't remember anything seemingly deceptive, and none of the news articles seem to actually provide any details. So what precisely was deceptive?
And even the cancellation part, it's just two confirmation screens. It doesn't seem bad. It honestly seems about the same as any other website subscription I've ever had. You click to cancel, say yes I really don't want the benefits (this is the only extra step), and then click to confirm the cancellation.
https://www.axios.com/local/washington-dc/2025/09/17/trump-f...
On both .com and AWS, Amazon is reaching a stage of maturity where they’re running out of new customers. While still a fan of both, they’re both getting annoying as innovation slows and they get more annoying with a focus on doing things to make your use “sticky” vs making you trip over yourself to buy something because it’s great.
Amazon is full of counterfeit or low quality junk that one needs to navigate. AWS is muddling things with far too many random services thrown at the wall vs just being really good at a few core things. In today competitive environment account teams can’t really explain why we should use AWS apart from “we’re AWS” which is again an answer from a company aging into more stagnating maturity.
The fine, while more than a rounding error, is still small. However it will hopefully help cut down on some of Amazon’s more annoying behaviors.
I'd hope that they fixed this. If an account is locked, it seems like it would be common sense to place a hold on any subscriptions associated with it.
I do still end up ordering from time to time, and the checkout process for non-Prime members is horrific. Multiple Prime sign-up offers that I always need to carefully read so I don’t click the wrong thing, illogical default shipping options, with more tricks to try and get the user to sign up for Prime while choosing shipping, after having already declined multiple times.
I don’t know why any non-Prime customer would want to sign up for Prime after such a user-hostile experience full of dark patterns.
I graphed out my orders since the start of my Amazon account. There was a steady uptrend over 20 years, with yearly growth since 2018. All of that ended 2023. My orders fell off a cliff, dropping by 60% in 2024. The treatment of non-Prime customers isn’t winning me back, it’s pushing me further away. I think my goal for 2026 will be not to order anything from Amazon. It’s been such a bad experience. Apparently their goal of being the world’s most customer-centric company only applies to Prime users.
I hope this judgement will get them to change their ways, but I’m assuming they will do as little as possible to comply, and still pushing Prime hard.
The main problem is that unless it's a specific brand store, with products sold and shipped by Amazon, all the other products are pure junk. I can easily find them on AliExpress with much lower prices.
In the meantime I was fed up with Prime Video and wondering why I was paying for it.
Between the dark patterns cancelling Prime and the many dark patterns trying to get you to join Prime I also stopped feeling like a welcome customer of large sections of Amazon's website and have gone even more back to boring old retail stores. My biggest remaining relationship with Amazon is because of the kindle, but their worsening DRM decisions do keep me wondering if I need to explore another ecosystem despite kindle's hardware advantages (including the possibly sunk cost that I invested in too much kindle hardware).
When you get a free (or cheaper than you're currently paying for shipping) Prime offer, you can accept it and then the second the order has gone through go into your account and cancel it and still get the remaining number of promotional days, as well as the benefits for the current order. It's a slightly annoying step, but I figure if they're going to be dumb enough to keep offering me free promotions I might as well take advantage of it.
Nah, jk. Of course not.
This should be its own lawsuit.
When I worked there (more than a decade ago) senior leaders and old-timers were extremely proud of the fact that they did things like sending "your Prime membership will renew in (a month - I think) - be sure to cancel if you don't want it to" emails. This was quite different from typical subscription services providers at the time.
In fact, I had more than one old-timer mention that they would ask employment candidates about the Prime pricing and renewal strategy and that candidates who said something along the lines of "it's best for people to subscribe and then never use it so we make margin on the service revenue" (along the lines of gym business models) would be rejected.
They really wanted people to want to be Prime members (this was even before Bezos' famous "you'd be irresponsible not to be a Prime member" comment...)
I found it really easy to cancel. They even refunded me when I canceled my subscription after the free trial expired (forgot to cancel before that despite being notified).
Clicking passed the "look at what you will lose if you cancel" screen is not my idea of "hard".
Yes, they push for subscriptions, usually using promotional offers. It is called marketing, and Amazon is relatively mild in that regard.
Maybe it could create a precedent and make the majority of subscription services pay.
Our local parking authority (meter maids) just paid out a massive settlement (/s): each claimant gets four (4) twenty-five cent (25¢) parking credits (==$1.00), which expire within one month. They also raised parking rates by about that much, per hour.
Winning! /s
I genuinely can't fathom these numbers. As in: it could be $25B or $250M and it would mean the same to me.
Does this materially impact Amazon?
I'm (really) not a fan of Amazon, but to me that's an existential amount of money. I don't think I've ever worked anywhere where that kind of money wouldn't be a "ok, I guess we're closing down, turn off the lights when you leave" situation, and I've worked at some large companies.
I'm not usually exposed to financials I guess but my burn rate for my last (very small) company was about $4-5M/y roughly. This amount of money would keep us all gainfully employed for about 500 years.