Amazon intentionally made it hard to cancel Prime subscription in secret project
independent.co.uk
independent.co.uk
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).
The entire procedure is described very explicitly in the law and breaks down to a 2-step process:
1. mandatory cancellation button, which, if pressed, leads to a
2. confirmation page, where a defined set of parameters is requested and a confirmation button then cancels the contract.
In my eyes the defined set of parameters on the confirmation page can easily been abused to make the process more difficult for the user.
The parameters required are:
1. Type of cancellation
2. Unique identification of the user
3. Unique identification of the contract
4. The desired end date of the contract
5. Means of electronic communication for cancellation confirmation (email)
Topic 2 can be made very difficult and is in my eyes superficial - if the user logged into his account, he is identified IMO.
Topic 3 is ambivalent, how do you identify an contract? By title and date, by ID? In my eyes there should be a popup with existing contracts to choose from (which can easily be done if the user is logged in).
Topic 4 is prone to errors, because many contracts have notice periods. So the user has to do research on his contract and if he gets the lifetime/notice periods wrong his cancellation will fail.
Information (unfortunately only in german):
https://www.voelker-gruppe.com/stuttgart/kuendigungsschaltfl...
Require all companies who provide any kind of subscription service to implement specific API hooks that interact with a government portal. Specify the API endpoints, their expected payloads, and the resultant behaviors in excruciating detail (use formal methods if needed) and require that they send the API tokens to a specific secure endpoint controlled by the government.
And the standard way of cancelling your service will be to log into the government portal, browse the list of subscription services you're subscribed to until you find what you're looking to cancel, click the checkbox next to it, and click 'Unsubscribe'. And the government portal will send an authenticated request to the company's legally-mandated cancel API and the cancel request, by law, must immediately result in automated total purging of the user's account with the company within 10 seconds of receiving the request.
I think the challenge for extending this approach to the rest of the economy is that many recurring payments / subscriptions involve situations where cancellations are naturally complex.
Insurance, premium bank accounts, property taxes, car rentals, and school fees all involve recurring payments - but are naturally complicated to cancel for fair-ish reasons.
I want a god damn subscription manager app with centralized payment processing and toggle subscription switches.
Turkey has that, but unfortunately only a limited number of companies participate.
It is not ambivalent. Most places have an account number. (It is needed because you might have more than one contract with the same company)
hopefully there is a regulator to monitor and enforce the new legislation, and it will be treated as an adversarial iterative game, where v2 of the legislation will eliminate some of the more malicious interpretations of how to comply
Your online shop says it offers "insured shipping"? Cease-and-desist letter in your mailbox next day. You don't give a price per unit (kg, l, etc.)? Cease-and desist. Send the required information on the mandatory 14 day return period in the email body instead of a PDF attachment? Cease-and-desist. Don't comply to just one of the other ever changing consumer protections laws? Cease-and-desist.
My parents wouldn't know what to fill in the contract identification field of the cancellation form.
Plenty of room for dark patterns.
unlike some problems[+], this one doesn't immediately seem like a problem that requires widespread international cooperation. if country X cannot be bothered to regulate against companies using dark patterns for cancelling subscriptions, then the citizens in country X suffer the negative consequences. there's a local and short-term incentive for country X to fix the problem for the benefit of its current citizens.
maybe it breaks down if the state in country X makes policy decisions for the benefit of special interest groups (e.g. those enjoying the riches plundered by companies with hard-to-unsubscribe services) and is unwilling to regulate for the benefit of its citizens
[+] such as global warming
"The account logged in right now"
> Unique identification of the contract
"The only contract I have with you"
> The desired end date of the contract
"Next possible date"
Note that specifications like that already have to be accepted when canceling via email or letter since forever. Requiring anything substantially harder than that won't qualify. In particular, customers can't be required to go through a maze to hunt for some arcane contract number that is not typically used in communication with them.
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 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.
- 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."
In the beginning Prime was about free 2-day shipping and $3.99 next-day shipping, and was written into the ToS.
Then one time I wanted to ship something next-day and the charge was going to be $8.99. I was curious about when it had changed, and what the rules were: but the current ToS didn't specify a particular price, and I couldn't find any notification from Amazon about the change, so I went digging in Wayback.
To cut things short, at some point Amazon changed the ToS, removing the requirement that they notify customers of future changes, while the $3.99 price remained the same. Then, at some point in the future, Amazon removed the $3.99 guarantee but was no longer required to notify customers that they'd now be paying more for that service. Very sneaky.
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.
Yet, you also have my condolences. It is not fun...
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).
Maybe most people won’t care, but this has put me off subscribing to any Amazon service in future.
When I changed my name to "FUCK AMAZON" my request was immediately processed, prior comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23720203
PMs are under pressure and incentivized to release features or somehow show impact that translates into some bottom line metric. If you can show your work attributed X% decrease in cancellations or Y% increase in bottom line profit, especially with a small engineering team, that’s your fastest path to promotion. This leads to a culture of churning out “features”, often at the expense of the end product or the expense of customers.
I guarantee you there were a/b test results that were summarized and twisted around in a document, presenting the test results as a net win for customers.
And there are second and third order effects - constant tweaks and duct tape on top of monolithic systems that prevent Amazon from being innovative. The company makes shockingly little investment in this area, and when you couple that with engineers constantly churning, it becomes clear that product teams deliver some dark pattern or other unhelpful feature because the poorly strung together architecture limits any real innovation.
The engineers may have their own opinions, but at the end of the day nobody gives a shit about what they think except on design and scale concerns. What’s the operational/support cost of X? If we promise Y to our leadership, can we deliver it by this date?
Most of the recent hiring when I left, especially for engineers, were study abroad students from China or India. They wouldn’t say anything being afraid not to rock the boat, especially because of their work situation. If a manager puts them on a development plan, they will most likely get fired and have to leave the US. The company has found this structure so advantageous to its business that if not for Indian and Chinese talent, in my opinion, Amazon in its current cultural state would implode.
So are PMs at all companies?
Now, I know it's slightly paranoid to assume that it wasn't just a bug preventing me from canceling, but at the scale Amazon operates at, and the SLAs they shoot for, what are the odds that it would occur at the moment I try to cancel? To the conspiracy theorist side of me, it felt like a dark pattern.
In my mind, the lengths that Amazon would go to to prevent Prime cancellations adds more suspicion about my Kindle Unlimited cancellation experience.
I know it's a massive coincidence that that happened to you, but I really do think it was just a coincidence. If it happened too often, people would be screaming about it on social media in no time.
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.
On my iOS device, going to Amazon.com in safari, I initiated the return, and then the question of how I want to process the return came up, and the top 3 or 4 options all resulted in me not getting my money back. The option to refund to original payment method was all the way at the bottom (had to scroll), and in a different color/formatting such that it took me effort to recognize it as an option.
My parents and their ilk would have no chance against this kind of nonsense.
Sadly.
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 nearly got stung by the same trap on ShutterStock a few weeks back.
> 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
Amazon still offers "free delivery" without Prime, but the web site gives you a date further in the future. In practice, they usually deliver faster than that. There are dark patterns to keep you away from that option, but it works fine. I don't have Prime and haven't paid for Amazon delivery in a long time.
When I've tried to cancel them, it takes me through a confusing series of dialogs that I have to read very carefully to make sure I'm doing the correct thing.
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...
"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 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?
If you want to look at it purely mathematically, I find that typical postage from an independent online retailer costs ~€4 for something by small. So if I purchase more than 2-3 items per month, the cost of Prime is already earned back.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
A dark pattern I really hate is when you have to use the desktop version of a website to change certain settings or cancel.
The ideal would be to have a a website like privacy.com here in Canada but there's no service or even bank that allows you to have disposable credit cards. I wonder if it's due to regulatory differences
They changed something. I had to allow amazon.dev in ublock origin.
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.
We're better off coming up with our own solution(s). Or at least trying.
I have prime and I don't know why. No one is paying for it, but i get prime shipping on everything. If i try to look at my prime settings i have the option to sign up for prime. not complaining though.
Hate the game, not the players.
I for one am not going to sign up again.
Still, there should be a rule that cancelling must be at least as easy as signing up.
like email client's 'unsubscribe' button but for everything
designing this feature would be a natural fit for apple if they were actually pro consumer rights, rather than trying to destroy, then become, facebook
the perfect example of interfacing your cash into their pockets.