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.