Amazon named its “labyrinthine” Prime cancellation process after Homer’s Iliad | Hacker News Reader

Amazon named its “labyrinthine” Prime cancellation process after Homer’s Iliad

arstechnica.com

60 pointsbelfalas28 comments

I worked for a SMB startup years ago that had a “call us” cancellation model, mostly out of a need for several manual steps as part of offboarding and yes, probably some recognition that cancelation friction helped metrics. Eventually the support burden was too great and we built a fully automated no-BS cancellation flow. Our retention metrics immediately tanked to a greater extent than anyone had thought possible and we were forced by the CEO to redesign it with a bunch of interstitials and extra clicks.

I feel like this is the dark side of SaaS economics: lots of customers pay for recurring services they don’t use, out of optimism or laziness or something else. Being able to leverage that inertia can be profitable, even if it’s also unethical.

Curious, was the improve after the redesign huge?

It’s been a while but I believe we recovered something like 40% of the churn.

This is why I no longer use my own credit card to sign up for anything if I can avoid doing so. Instead, I use Privacy.com to generate cards for each service, and if a service decides to be a pain in the ass in terms of letting me cancel, I simply shut off its card so I can't be charged.

Paypal has it's flaws for sure, but one thing I love about paypal is ability to easily manage and turn off recurring subscriptions. One toogle bar, boom, over, gone, donezo. Easy peasy.

Some services (for eg: https://www.immobilienscout24.de/)

continue to bill you even after you cancel your payment. Apparently you have to cancel the contract (which they hide away under several menu options) or they will continue to bill you and you are legally required to pay it or they send debt collectors after you.

Same. Also Apple payments are great for subscriptions, as like PayPal, they provide a control center to cancel subscriptions. For things like streaming services where I know I only need it for a month, I cancel them within seconds of signing up.

I guess it's ok to swap their Customer Obsession leadership principle for dark patterns if it means squeezing out some extra dollars.

In the logic of Amazon, Customer obsession means making sure they remain customers, because Amazon is a net good in their lives. To Amazon, their labyrinthine cancellation process is like tricking your toddler into eating broccoli. Sure, it’s deceptive, but it’s good for them.

That's basically the same thing for all companies. Google believes its ads are genuinely useful to its users, so showing ads is a win-win situation for Google and for users. Showing Google users ads is like keep reminding a toddler that broccoli is good.

No, no one believes this sort of thing except perhaps a tiny minority of halfwits. Don't confuse enforced "company spirit" with reality.

That's my point. You need to really drink the koolaid to believe that for either Amazon or Google.

What does it mean to “believe“ in the logic of your employer? To my mind, it does not really matter whether you “believe“ the logic itself; only that you continue to labor under it.

A lot of people, especially younger ones fresh out of college, automatically believe in the "mission" and culture of their employer. They focus on what their employer does well in and has positive impact, and systematically turn a blind eye to where their employer fails.

I suppose it's a matter of experience.

That makes sense. I guess I never thought anyone actually believed these things, any more than they “believed” in the logic of a video game. To me, it was always just something you learned, the way you learn a language or a national culture. It’s a means to achieve a certain end (directly: the role, indirectly: $), not a thing to be taken any more seriously than that.

Not going to mention the Odyssey would have been the more appropriate reference? The Iliad isn't really that long.

More Greeks (and Trojans) didn't make it out alive in The Iliad? I do think describing something as an "odyssey" now has generally positive connotations (presumably Honda wouldn't have used it to name a vehicle if we still took it to mean "long and torturous journey")

I was thinking Gilgamesh followed by Sisyphus in the form of an animated caption on John Oliver where a popup dialog continues to ask when the user confirms to cancel with another dialog.

> Not going to mention the Odyssey would have been the more appropriate reference? The Iliad isn't really that long.

The odyssey is modeled after the iliad. Both poems are divided into 24 books and both the trojan war and the voyage in odyssey was 10 years long. Iliad has more lines though - 15,693 (Iliad) vs 12,109 (Odyssey).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iliad

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odyssey

Maybe Odyssey would have been too on-the-nose!

The action of the Iliad covers a few days, but the siege of Troy is said to have lasted ten years. That matches up well with the Odyssey, which covers the last few days of another ten years. So I guess the question is whether the cancellation feels more like repeated shipwreck and stranding, or like being struck with edged weapons.

If they can sell stuff in one click, why would being able to not buy stuff be anything harder?

Actually maybe mandating that any buying process must be as hard or harder than cancelation process would be good start.

The fact you can cancel online is a good thing though. Some places have you send an email which is terrible. Honestly a unified API endpoint for all this would be a godsend.

Some places make you cancel with a snail mail letter or in-person. Lots of gyms do this.

My experience cancelling prime was about 6 clicks and it was instant. Could have been 1, sure. But surprises me that the FTC is taking issue. Maybe being big is what catches their eye, while Planet Fitness flies under the radar.

Turkey has you covered.

Four pages and six clicks doesn’t sound that bad to me, tbh.

How does it compare to signing up?

That's nothing. You should see what I used to call the program that would kill all the apache2 prefork processes that I was badly sysadmining as a teen. "kill_apaches". Was I enforcing Manifest Destiny, perhaps? Was I part of the brutal campaign to end one Native American tribe? Or did I just not know that:

- killall existed

- I can control num processes

- this brand new nginx thing is probably decent

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