Amazon duped millions of consumers into enrolling in Prime, US FTC says | Hacker News Reader

Amazon duped millions of consumers into enrolling in Prime, US FTC says

reuters.com

299 pointstestrun134 comments

Amazon's dark patterns around cancelling Prime membership left such a disgusting taste in my mouth that I swore the company off. Nasty.

This was some years ago but I decided it wasn't worth the cost for me so I went inside my settings to cancel. Their stipulations for cancelling the membership were "Come back 2 days before the account is set to auto-renew and cancel then." Excuse me? That was in like 6 months. Can't remove the credit card. Can't ask them to just stop auto charging.

I set about 40 calendar reminders and cancelled at 12:01am 2 days before auto renew and then nuked my Amazon account.

Dark patterns. Dark heart.

That’s pretty bad. In order to reset password with the same company they’ve asked me to verify the last four digits of a credit card, never reset the pw and this was years ago.

> I decided it wasn't worth the cost for me so I went inside my settings to cancel. Their stipulations for cancelling the membership was "Come back two days before the account is set to auto-renew and cancel then."

I'm not defending Amazon's sneaky tactics to trick people into signing up for prime. They got me too.

But I didn't have any trouble cancelling it right away, and I went through it only a few months ago. Not saying you're wrong, though - they probably changed things since you had your experience.

You can cancel it right away, it's just intentionally obfuscated.

The many layers of cancellation buttons with different layouts strongly suggest that they a/b test for maximum difficulty.

I have never had any issues canceling several times over the years.

Twice was in response to lost packages between Amazon warehouses by amazon, on phone said I was disatisfied with prime and requested a full refund. - I was like 7 months into a year paid.

They apologized and gave me a full refund of the 1 yr. Not even pro-rated... Full amount

I signed up again a few weeks later

How many clicks did it take you to end up on that phone call talking to a person? How many phone calls did it take you to sign up?

Good for you that you asked for the refund, but still it always sucks how many hoops you have to jump through to cancel this stuff. Especially when they make it so easy to sign up that I know people who signed up accidentally (and I've almost done it myself).

I worked on Prime for a long time many years ago, and it’s sad that dark patterns have taken over. We built a lot of behind the scenes stuff to automate self-service free and pro-rated refunds during cancellation (if you didn’t use any benefits you’d get a full refund, a few benefits got you a prorated refund, and if you used it a bunch already, we’d turn off auto-renew and let the contract run to the end). If you signed up and didn’t use any benefits, you wouldn’t be auto-renewed. The group was extremely customer centric.

We also had metrics around delivery times, which seems to have gone out the window as well.

I believe you.

I would hazard a guess that the people on your former team at Prime were "managed out" after strongly opposing the dark patterns that product teams and execs demanded they implement. Would be cool to hear from others with actual knowledge of the situation on the specifics of how this state of affairs came to be.

An aside:

I am strongly considering canceling my Prime membership. I don't need 2 day delivery on anything that I order from them. In addition, Prime memberships have increased in price, and I don't use any of the other benefits that Prime offers. Throw in the fact that 1) prices for everything have increased to the point where it's often easier and cheaper for me to go to my local big box store that starts with W or C, and buy the same thing and get it same-day, and 2) there are so many knockoff and bogus sellers on Amazon now, and Amazon does not do a great job at enforcing their policies and removing them.

I don't even get two day delivery with prime.

I live in the boonies, so on one hand, what do I expect? But on the other hand, they did for like six years and were never late.

i wonder if that had something to do with their breakup with FedEx?

Maybe. When the two day was actually still working, I would mostly get them via UPS, but sometimes FedEx. That's still the case now (mostly UPS), they just come after more delay.

Also a boonies-Prime-er that had to cancel Prime because I gave up on it again. Even with Prime apparently my orders don't ship for 3-4 days, and only then do they ship Next Day Air and show up on day 5 after the order.

When I complained to Amazon Executive CS about it their answer was that I "selected Standard Shipping" even though I was given no other choices for shipping that would expedite it...

I am not at all in the boonies and Amazon rarely or never gives shipping options other than to delay shipment for “Prime day”.

In SF and a heavy Amazon user: 2 day shipping has gone out the window. Rarely things arrive on their expected date and Amazon now seems to "hand things off" sometimes.

Just last week got a message saying an item was handed off to the local post office and I would have to come pick it up(!) I Was going to complain but the next day it was delivered anyway, by someone. They have consistently degraded their delivery to save a nickel.

Amazon Prime video recently dropped the "show me what's free to me" link. Now they show tons of options that are free with ads, free with trial subscription, etc.

Within the first year of Prime Video they started sticking trailers for Amazon properties before Prime content. I complained at an org all hands meeting that this seems to contradict the “ad free” claim, but was blown off. That kind of slippery slope crap is how unscrupulous business people move a product from loves to reviled, imho.

Maybe they're only A/B testing the dark patterns, because this is exactly how it worked for me recently. I turn Prime on & off every so often. Last time (~a month ago) I forgot to cancel before the auto-renew, it very easily gave me a full refund on the month I didn't mean to buy.

Even if a company deliberately avoided dark patterns, adopted an idealistic "don't be evil" approach, is it inevitable that either:

1. To maximize profit, it sacrifices that approach and becomes evil

2. It fails to compete with other companies which do use dark patterns to maximize profit

I do not think this is true in all cases. The whole platform economy has so little to fear from actual competition that they could afford to avoid dark patterns and overall take a small loss in profitability. It is only that they do not want to eat even the small loss.

I disagree. Compare Walmart and Costco on a lot of their processes and practices around vendors and employees and I think you can find some stark differences.

That's why government enforcement is wildly considered the norm in cases where corporate incentive to abuse must be attenuated.

I generally only subscribe for Black Friday so I cancel Prime a LOT and the fact they've gotten away with it this long is insane.

There's actually a feature to send you an email before your renewal so you can decide if you wanna cancel or not... but you could opt into that, and for two or three years it was broken so you could opt into it and it would just... never email you.

That's a pretty convenient bug.

That's what I figured. I wondered why the thing that helped people think about cancelling managed to just not get fixed for years...

My experience (n=1) was not so bad.

I cancelled Amazon Prime 4 or 5 times in the last decade. Yes they try to keep you and make you jump through 2 or 3 confirmation pages but it never prevented me from actually cancelling on whatever day I decide to do so.

Audible also has a lengthy cancellation process and usually informs you at the end that you get to enjoy the benefits till end of current billing cycle after which you will not be charged.

I just canceled right now, after realizing the Prime membership costs increased from $80 to $140 in 6 years.

This is the thing that got us to cancel. My wife logged in and realized the price had steadily increased every year. We really haven’t missed it for a second and if we have to order something on Amazon, it gets here at basically the same speed.

I cancelled a while ago. It is easier and faster to shop at a local store...and often times a lot cheaper, too.

For instance, some gardening gear was 3x more expensive than Home Depot. I guess they are counting on people not cross shopping.

I returned 3 of the last 4 orders. 2 were straight up counterfeits.

Not to mention, most of the items are the junk being sold under many random names.

I said before that Amazon has become an online flea market. Now, it is much worse than that.

In Europe you can just cancel easily and they offer a refund or keep it till the end of the month (I cancelled a few weeks ago)

European consumer protections are the bane of American corporations.

German here. Cancelling prime is full with dark patterns as well. I just looked it up. The wording is completely unclear. The text says:

"Mitgliedschaft kündigen Wenn du deine Mitgliedschaft jetzt kündigst, verlierst du den Zugriff auf deine Prime-Vorteile."

→ Continue

"X, warum auf alle Prime-Vorteile verzichten? Du kannst Prime noch 172 Tage bis zur nächsten Zahlung genießen. Du verlierst damit den Zugang zu diesen und weiteren Vorteilen, die in deiner Mitgliedschaft inklusive sind: ..."

→ "Mit Kündigung fortfahren"

The text makes it sound as if you cancel all benefits right away, but still pay for the full year.

Similar in the UK, but I've used tor free trial enough times to notice the difference, if you're not paying it specifically mentions that you will lose benefits immediately. Interestingly on the "week for 99p" trial, you lose benefits immediately and get a partial refund, if you cancel soon enough? if you haven't hit a certain number of orders? Not sure. They'll also refund if you cancel at the start of a new month having not made any orders.

Amazon is shitty in a million ways, but asking for confirmation (once more IIRC) if you want to cancel Prime is far from a dark pathern IMHO.

You just need to read the question and press the right button.

The problem is that we have forgoten how to read and we just press buttons nilly willy.

I have moved to 3 countries and each time I cancelled prime, and I have never had any problems.

With respect, did you not read the part about being unable to cancel until 48 hours or less until the subscription renewal day? That's a clear dark pattern, with only one obvious motive: making the process more difficult.

Is this still the case ? Or is this a US only thing ? I cancelled prime without this clause but I'm not in the US.

Thats not what the UI shows. You can click on the second button that says cancel now and it will cancel. The remind me later is the primary button but you can still cancel right away. Don’t have to wait until 48 hours before renewal.

I recall having an option to do it like that.

But it was one of the options. You can cancel right away.

When I went through it a few years ago, the buttons and explanations were very clearly written in such a way as to make it appear that immediate cancellation would strip access to benefits immediately, without any mention of the possibility of prorated refund.

This is obviously very unnappealing if you pay annually and have months left, making the “Remind me 3 days before the next billing cycle” button seem like the only reasonable option… which is the whole point, since surely a large percentage of people who want to cancel will miss the reminder and get charged for another year.

A customer friendly design would offer two buttons: lose access immediately and get a refund for unused time, or disable auto renewal and lose access at the end of the billing period. There is no reason to have the “Remind Me” option unless your goal is to cause a portion of your intending-to-cancel users to renew by accident.

Again, we cancelled 3 times me, and 2 times my wife (we opened accounts in France and Spain while in Germany), without any problems whatsoever.

I had a similar experience cancelling Prime. They used some really ugly patterns such as making cancel links as obscure as possible while adding big CTA buttons to try to keep me subscribed.

I tried to cancel a subscription I had recently for a cosmetic product and the website literally told me that if I wanted to cancel I had to call the company and explain why.

I'm surprised these patterns are legal to be honest. If I don't want to pay for something and I have no contractual obligation to continue paying it should be a simple "cancel" -> "confirm" journey. Anything more and it starts to feel deceptive and a little fraudulent.

I've learnt my lesson though. I put all subscriptions on burner cards now and simply cancel the card when I don't want the subscription anymore. Much less hassle and all my subscriptions can be managed from a single app.

Depending on your jurisdiction, that may not work. the payment authorisation is legally distinct from the contractual obligation to pay, and cancelling one doesn't cancel the other. Of course, most companies will give up if you cancel the card, but some will threaten to send round debt collectors.

There do need to be some laws about what companies can write into contracts about how to cancel.

I wasn’t aware of this, but it’s good information. I suppose the lesson is to be very selective regarding what services you sign up for. Even if a service is good right now, they could do a bait and switch at any time.

I cancelled my Prime account some years ago (I moved to a country where Amazon wasn't available), and I don't remember it being thaaaat difficult. However, I wanted to cancel an Adobe subscription - there you have dark patterns... I am never touching any Adobe product again.

Another anecdote: Someone in the house bought subscriptions to a channel and amazon music through the TV. I canceled both of them relatively easily, but I had to find where they were as the subscriptions were managed in different places. For music, I had to confirm 3x that I actually wanted to cancel and not swap to a family plan, or be reminded 3 days before expiration, etc. Now that I think about it, I also googled and followed the results to the cancelation links because I couldn't easily find them on the site and didn't want to spend forever looking. Eventually, I finished and everything was refunded.

I started this response as a counter to your experience, because it didn't feel that difficult, but typing it out makes me think that I've sadly just become numb to the behavior and have seen this type of activity so often that I was happy that this was all it took and there was no arguing on the phone with some call center agent.

I cancelled since their prices kept getting less and less competitive, and packages were taking a week to show up with "free" "two day" prime shipping. I finally had to report my card as lost to stop them from charging me. Even after I didn't have prime anymore they had the sketchy dark patterns at checkout trying to get you to sign up again so I cancelled my amazon account entirely (which was also a huge pain in the ass that was full of dark patterns). I thought it was going to be a huge pain without amazon as an option but really I haven't missed it. Other companies and even mom & pop stores have really stepped up their online shopping so I have actually had better prices, shipping times, and experiences since quitting amazon. For such a massive corporation the tactics they use are early 2000's satellite TV provider tier. It's embarrassing.

For me I didn't cancel my account, I just gradually stopped shopping there since the results were full of dropshippers selling identical crappy products, making it impossible to find anything in decent quality and even if you do, i stopped trusting that the products I would receive wouldn't be fake. I used to order a lot on amazon, now I do it about twice a year.

They might have different patterns, as I cancelled my Prime membership a couple of years ago and it was very easy/straightforward. (Or maybe the dark patterns have surfaced since then.)

Cancelled Prime some years ago (customer since the very beginning).

Now I need to find the (small) no-prime link every time when checking out - between many prime links.

Amazon tells me 10 days delivery if I don't use prime. Then after ordering it becomes 8 days, then 5 days, then 3 days.

(Main reason to cancel, I mostly got/get used items for full price)

I’ve purchased thousands of items on Amazon over the last two decades. I maybe only one time got something that was used but marked as new. What kind of items are you getting that are used?

This might be Germany specific, I don't know. People seem to order stuff, use it, then send it back, and Amazon sells it as new (which it isn't - just like cars, you buy it and drive it, it's a used car).

Used items: Electronics, DSLRs, mirrorless cameras, lenses (especially bad, has someone dropped them?), latest (this week) was a Gardena water splitter. I mostly by somewhere else if possible today (Bauhaus for garden stuff, Mediamarkt for electronics, cameras from my local store).

It doesn't help that too many manufacturers don't seal their packaging.

I have around 180 orders from Amazon in 2022 in Germany, I've ordered multiple DSLRs/Mirrorless cameras, lenses, all my Gardena stuff, and a ton of more things - never had one single item arrive that showed any signs of use, neither on the package nor on the item itself, and I've never heard anyone else say that they got used items.

It's very weird that you've had so many used items delivered, but it's definitely not a common thing in Germany.

I made the mistake of ordering a lens from Amazon. It arrived in a bubble envelope.

I didn't even bother to see if it was functional.

They did the same thing with 2 2tb nvme drives. Bubble envelope. Sent right back.

And yet, they will sell me $12 wet wipes that are double boxed.

eh, the nvme drives should be fine I think.

It's totally weird that you never got this. Perhaps you spend so much money on Amazon (I'm sadly not that rich - 180 orders/year of electronics,cameras and lenses, wow, I'd wish I had that spare money!), that you moved into a VIP bracket.

I've met many people in Germany who also got used stuff from Amazon and therefor left. I also know several people who buy 3 cameras/TVs/phones, use them for two weeks and then send 2 of them back and keep one.

And whenever I've bought lenses on Amazon I didn't find marketplace deals, so these cameras and lenses need to end up somewhere. Amazon is trashing returns but for sure not $3k cameras.

Amazon once sent me a slightly used deodorant stick - someone else's armpit hair included.

I go direct or Ebay most of the times now.

Main feature that Amazon has - pages and pages of knock-off Chinese brands - is more elegant on Ebay.

I don't use Amazon but the alternatives I regularly use all clearly label returned items as "opened box" or "B-stock" and sell them at a ~15% discount.

USA here. Amazon certainly sells trash and used items as new. Not every order but every now and then, if you look closely enough, you will see “oh that tape has a fingerprint under it” or something similar. Infamous story of woman getting a box of soiled diapers.

Another complication are the 3rd party sellers.

I’ve gotten used watches, air filters, lights etc. personal health gear, books, and more. Again it’s not the rule but it certainly happens and you have to pay close attention.

Another dark pattern is that you cannot select sold and shipped by Amazon only anymore, which to my personal experience, leads to higher chances of counterfeits.

Had a wedding registry on Amazon once, got some high end knives that immediately started rusting. Realized a lot of the stuff we got was 3 rd party sellers, figured some of it might be counterfeit and I wouldn’t be able to tell until it was too late. Returned hundreds of pounds of cookware, cast iron, etc all at amazons expense.

“oh that tape has a fingerprint under it”

This!

UK: I'm getting good at guessing where the small plain light blue 'order without Prime' link is. My average monthly order is tiny - nowhere near being worth a Prime subscription.

I've noticed over the last couple of years that sometimes when following the no Prime link, the option for standard delivery isn't available for the item I'm buying. Only 'next day' at around £4 or so. So I just cancel the purchase and wait a few days. Magically the normal £2.80 per book or even free delivery becomes available again.

When you say "cancel the purchase" do you mean you leave it in your cart, but don't pay for it? Or did you actually remove it from your cart and then re-add it later?

Most online purchase services have means of tracking which customers begin the checkout process, but backout or cancel after X amount of time, and leave the item in their cart. I seem to recall Squarespace having this listed as a feature for one of their pricier subscription options for their online retail service.

I meant 'remove from cart'.

Has happened half a dozen times over the last couple of years.

I always check abebooks as well as the actual purchase price for a second hand book can be lower there. Which is funny as they are owned by Amazon.

I was actually pleasantly surprised by Prime cancellation recently. I bought a gift for a friend on Amazon US (I’m based in the UK), and accepted the trial of Prime to get the shipping free. I forgot to cancel it until they charged me. But a few days after the charge when I cancelled they had an option to be refunded for the month I’d accidentally paid for, which was a pleasant surprise.

Well, I tried it after reading the article, and currently it is very intuitive to cancel your Prime membership:

- Clicked the "Hello, Your Account & Lists" button on the home page

- Clicked the "Prime" button

- There is a big link that says "Update, cancel, and more..." there

The article says that they changed the UI in April. Maybe it was worse before.

And then how many more steps? (I don't want to cancel right now so I didn't go all the way through the flow, but saw at least two "are you sure" prompts in a row...)

No idea, but at least it is easy to find it now. How many clicks it actually takes is largely irrelevant when we probably click thousands of times for much less trivial things every day.

> The lawsuit said that under substantial pressure from the FTC, Amazon changed its cancellation process in April but that "violations are ongoing" and that it still "requires five clicks on desktop and six on mobile for consumers to cancel from Amazon.com."

They clearly state here, that it was significantly worse before.

The suit can be seen here: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.32...

The lawsuit states: 114: "The Iliad Flow required consumers intending to cancel to navigate a four-page, six-click, fifteen-option cancellation process. In contrast, customers could enroll in Prime with one or two clicks."

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-prime-ftc-probe-custo...

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-project-iliad-juicies...

> Amazon intentionally drew out the process of canceling a Prime membership under a project code-named "Iliad," according to internal documents obtained by Insider.

Related stuff from the EU:

> Amazon changed its process for canceling Prime subscriptions last summer after pressure from the European Commission and national consumer watchdogs. The company introduced a simplified two-click process.

Article below has pictures from a previous EU case in 2022.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/5/23195019/amazon-prime-canc...

Oh no! 5 clicks, can you imagine?!

why not 1 or 2?

or an amount equal to the number needed to sign up?

if the intention isn't to retain the customer through dark patterns, why is Amazon doing it?

It actually takes 3 clicks now: Account > Prime > Cancel your subscription. Done.

1 click is simply a nonsensical expectation. There's not a single service that allows turning off a subscription in one click from their homepage. Not even 2.

3 clicks to cancel a paid subscription is absolutely reasonable, especially when there is absolutely no obfuscation of any type.

There is no dark pattern, it took me literally 5 seconds to go from homepage to cancellation button.

did you actually go through with cancellation, and did the full process end to end take 3 clicks?

or are you just counting how many clicks it takes to get to the button that starts the process?

the article this post is on says the number of clicks was far more than 3, end to end, so just count those, and compare with the number needed to sign up

there's no reason the cancellation should take longer than signup, especially if Amazon properly warns and confirms when you want to sign up like they do when you want to cancel.

I actually think the 15 options part is slightly worse.

Convoluted menus tend to discourage interaction. Any sort of psychological traps to prevent cancellation should be explicitly illegal.

And hey, if it wasn't a big deal, why did Amazon create project Illiad in the first place?

Yeah, it was almost too easy. I accidently just cancelled my membership testing this because I was expecting a confirmation prompt that never came.

I actually feel embarrassed for Amazon when I'm trying to checkout and can see all the deceptive tricks they implement to make you sign up. This is one of the richest companies in the world acting like dodgy internet scammers.

Good to see this is finally catching up with them in some way.

What might be more sad is that either it will catch up to them and affect their profits, in which case, they will likely double down and make it worse, or it will not affect their profits (or they won't notice) and... they'll stick with it (and maybe double down for good measure). It's very unlikely that they'll "see the light" and fix the terrible user experience.

I recently had a thought provoking conversation with a carpenter near me: he told me that Amazon (and other online storefronts) have completely warped consumers' expectations around furniture, from grossly overpaying for cheap pieces to normalizing a materially worse customer experience (paying for the "privilege" of expedited delivery, when any honest local store will do a same-day dropoff for free or a nominal fee).

I haven't bought anything from Amazon for years, and my experience has been that this applies to nearly everything that I would have bought from them: buying it locally is cheaper, faster, with a better guarantee of quality, and with a human being (including often the manufacturer) on the other end.

I'm not sure if your second paragraph is still about furniture. But Amazon is objectively better than a brick and mortar experience by many metrics. With Amazon I can find exactly what I need in a few clicks. To find one item in a big box store would take 10x more time. This is probably the one metric that matters. Saving time.

This is true, which is the reason I use Amazon retail, but the experience is still dreadful: terrible, soul-crushing search experience, listings dominated by scams, cheap fakes, sponsored results, badly photoshopped images, paid reviews.

And then when you get frustrated and try Googling for a product, you get direct adverts for products which are on Amazon, pages of paid-for recommendations that link back to Amazon...

It's all so depressing.

That's actually probably one of the best things about Amazon - if there's a type of product you want, you can probably find it pretty quickly on Amazon, and then if you're ok with crappy quality and spending too much for what you're getting and paying for prime or shipping, then you can save a lot of time by just ordering it on Amazon. The things that stop me from doing that are, 1) wanting to see / try on the product in real life before I buy, 2) the fear of getting ripped off by buying something crappy on amazon when I could have gotten a better deal overall somewhere else, 3) wanting to get it sooner and not wait for it to ship, and 4) not wanting to get prime because their shitty ui that funnels you into getting prime rubs me the wrong way, and because of the psychological factor that I know will influence me to get more stuff from amazon if i get prime. Also 5) returns aren't as easy as at a store and the return policy is inconsistent

A smaller entity would not survive the reputational damage, Amazon will just shrug, "manage the damage" and move on. This is what letting corporate entities become too big does to market discipline: it annihilates it.

I am becoming increasingly disappointed by the lack of action on antitrust. It's abundantly clear to everyone that these mega-corporations wield sufficient power to distort their respective markets. The direct and indirect costs to consumers must be approaching unfathomable amounts.

What bothers me is that consumers don't care either.

Talk to any given yuppie and they'll shit all over amazon; from it's dark patterns, to Chinese counterfeit goods, to useless gamed rating system, to expensive membership with worsening benefits, to mountains cheap low quality products, to workers rights abuses.

But walk by their doorstep on any given day and there are 4 prime boxes sitting there.

Seriously guys, give that shit up. I'm two years clean and has had no impact on my life.

Where do you buy things from now? Is there something similar to Amazon that's better?

Any other website. Most offer free shipping now, often even 2 day shipping. I'll also buy online and pickup in store or simply just go to the store.

People just instinctually go to amazon now and don't even check other sources. Amazon isn't even cheaper anymore in many cases too.

Last time i used Amazon, they dynamically altered the shipping costs to be just above the cost of a month of prime (which would give me free shipping). Whether it was because I was once a Prime member or not, it felt so slimey.

Or maybe the typical delivery cost is close to $10? USPS Retail Ground® is $9.

Rates amazon is getting are nowhere near the retail price.

I'd guess that Amazon would pay not more than $5 if the address is in an urban or suburban area for them to have UPS ship the same package, and definitely less if they self-fulfill. Anecdotally I've heard that Amazon had UPS discounts that employees could use that gave almost half off.

The real question is why to pay $5 for a customer you likely will not see again ?

If the item is expensive enough probably you can offset the cost, but if their basket is worth $10, it makes no sense to subsidize their $5 shipping.

I am thinking of it from the perspective of an EBay seller.

I have stopped paying for prime years ago.

I regularly get a free 1 month trial that I accept and immediately cancel. When my trial expires, I wait until I get a new one. In the meantime I order without prime and still usually get my stuff in less than 2 days.

It's funny that people with Prime membership complain about the violation of the 2-day delivery promise, while those who have canceled their membership receive their packages within approximately 2 days, despite no longer being subscribers.

Forget about being duped into free trials that aren't easily canceled. Think about what it actually means for a company to commit to getting you nearly anything, anywhere in 2 days.

We may enjoy arguing about plastic straws and grocery bags but that's nothing compared to the resources needed to pull off prime shipping.

This is a really good point and something that isn’t pointed out often enough. There is massive carbon footprint and people impact to deliver things that quickly. Even though being a Prime delivery driver is a job to work, the way DSPs are generally treated makes me glad I cancelled Prime.

What prime shipping? Nothing has been delivered in 2-days since the pandemic. I live within 2 hours of the FedEx international hub and I don’t get anything in 2 days.

The only way they’re beating that is if they already have it in a warehouse near me which is very rare.

That was the only reason I even had prime.

Yep that's totally fair, i haven't had prime for a few years now but have heard from others that 2-day isn't common outside of Seattle and other major cities.

That doesn't change the promise though, if anything it would make sense for a company missing the 2-day promise to throw even more natural resources at the problem.

I'm curious where you live.

I'm in a suburb outside of Portland, OR. Nearly anything I order via Prime is here within 2 days. Often, if I place an order in the morning, I can get it next day, even. There are even some items I can get same day.

Related Article & thread from yesterday:

> FTC sues Amazon over ‘deceptive’ Prime sign-up and cancellation process

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36418713

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/21/ftc-sues-amazon-over-decepti...

The actual court document can be seen here: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.32...

I have to admit that those dark patterns on Amazon already saved me a good amount of money. For every order, I have to confirm that I don't want Prime (an estimated) 3 times now. Usually between the second and third click I'm reminded that I should shop around and to look for a better deal elsewhere (and usually there is one).

In that sense, thanks for your greed, Jeff.

I got prime a few times, just to get the free shipping, then cancelled right after. Now when I click prime, it just says something went wrong. Looks to me like u can get on a list.

I’d also like to see some legislation around this sort of consumer shadow-banning. If Amazon has decided I’m a terrible customer and they don’t want to offer me certain goods and services, I think I should be able to be informed about this fact. To be clear, it’s perfectly ok for them not to offer me the services. I just want to know the situation.

I don’t find Prime hard to cancel but I do agree that certain patterns are crafty. Like when I go to buy a single Kindle book and it defaults to their subscription service (Kindle Unlimited). With 1-click purchase, it’s too easy to buy and not know.

The one-click purchase is a real problem. It's way too easy to accidentally one-tap subscribe to Amazon Music Unlimited for example.

You then instantly get charged $8.99 + tax and have to spend 15 minutes on the phone talking to 3 different Amazon agents in different countries trying to get a refund which when finally granted, will come 5 days later.

Dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36418713

Amazon Prime is definitely hard to cancel, but I had a pleasant customer support experience at least.

A few years ago I came to realise I had left my monthly Prime subscription active for a whole year when I thought I had cancelled it.

Once I realised, I cancelled it and asked Amazon support if I could possibly get a refund; they granted it the next day after confirming I hadn't bought anything or watched Prime Video in that time.

I'm very careful to make sure I cancel Prime when I'm done with it now. It bothers me that they don't send an email receipt or anything every time you're billed.

Interesting, I complained to the California AG about not being able to cancel the auto renew in 2019.

Got this great line from Amazon customer service:

"Unfortunately, currently we don't have an option to turn off the prime membership. However you can turn off your prime membership in your Account (www.amazon.com/your-account). Just click "Manage Prime Membership" under "Settings," and click the "Do not continue" link."

FWIW the "Do not continue" thing didn't seem to actually exist. I had to wait for the renewal to happen then cancel after.

So I just cancelled my Prime membership to see how hard it is, and because cancelling subscriptions before they expire is a good idea anyway. I often get better offers just by doing this. I will very likely re-subscribe though. Here's what I did:

1) Select "Your Prime Membership" from the "Account & Lists" menu on the Amazon homepage. It's not hard to find and not in a surprising place.

2) At the top of that page is a menu titled "Manage Membership - update cancel and more". The dropdown contains a link saying "End Membership". They also warn right there "By ending your membership you will lose access to your Prime benefits." without telling me that I'm not actually going to lose any benefits until the end of the membership period. That's a very popular dark pattern. They clearly want me to wait until the last moment and then forget to cancel. On the other hand, they do send a reminder.

3) Clicking "End Membership" brings me to a page listing all my Prime benefits with a big button at the top saying "Use your benefits today". At the bottom of the page are three buttons, "Keep membership", "See More Plans" and "Continue to cancel". Continuing to cancel...

4) Now I'm on a page with a big fat headline saying "Please confirm your Prime membership cancellation" and a prominently highlighted button saying "End on 15 July 2023" next to a gray button saying "Keep Membership". Now they're finally letting me know when my membership benefits will end. Clicking this button actually cancels the membership.

So this is one unnecessary step and one annoying dark pattern (plus a few more subtle ones). It's not egregious. I would say it's slightly better than average.

The FTC needs to look into Amazon's practice of raising the price of goods the rough amount, for Prime members, which it ostensibly is supposed to be saving them on shipping.

More and more it is looking like Prime isn't much more than a streaming subscription and a single discount day. Unless there is some niche benefit that a relatively rare person is specifically keyed into.

As a UK-based Amazon customer, these dark patterns are getting out of control. They keep swapping interfaces every few days, and they are becoming increasingly complex. Now you have to de-select "use the remaining balance in my gift cards to pay for prime" every time you checkout. The you have to select a non-obvious button to not get fast delivery (otherwise enable prime). You then have to go through all of the orders in the checkout and ensure that the "free" option is selected.

That, plus they keep pushing this subscription service for repeat purchases, meaning that can slowly creep the prices of everything up and not notify you. They also now display prices as if you are subscribed, not the actual one-off purchase.

I saw this on my account actually! One day I was a family user on my brother's plan, the next I was a prime subscriber without my consent, using my payment method on file. I reached out to class action lawyers but no one responded. Really good to see the FTC taking action.

I have written my congressman and my state representative multiple times in two states, asking them to sponsor a bill to address this. The basic idea I have is that it should be illegal for an unsubscribe or cancellation process to take more time or effort or a different communication channel than its subscription process, and that the process to cancel must be easily discoverable. The fine would be way in excess of the value of a typical subscription, eg maybe $1000 or so per occurrence. This would also be an individual cause of action, meaning that, if you encountered this, you could take them to small claims court.

So far I have gotten a lot of positive noises but no action.

A friend of mine once found she'd somehow managed to sign up for Prime in America despite already being a Prime member in the UK. She only noticed 6 months later. Got her money back though. To this day she still can't work out how it happened.

I have a USA amazon account and a Japan amazon account. They are completely separate. So yes, it's easy to sign up for Prime multiple times if you use multiple accounts.

The accounts aren't completely separate, it's the same login on all sites and content is shared. But Prime subscriptions are separate.

Thank you for the correction. I looked up on their FAQ for clarification.

https://us.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=2... Change your Amazon Account Country

Important: If you create a new Amazon account instead of transferring the existing account, purchases won't be shared between the accounts. You’ll have separate login credentials for each account.

I can successfully say I never enrolled in Prime. I always thought the dark patterns around it were deceptive and deceitful - unfortunately they've gotten away with it for so long and bilked so many people and padded their forward accounting statements for so long with this revenue that I doubt any fine from the FTC has any real teeth to stop them from doing it again.

I remember that I thought I had cancelled Amazon Prime a year or two ago only to discover that I apparently hadn't.

Oh, I found the user story:

As a user, I want to be able to cancel my Prime membership. As a company, we don't want that.

I wonder if it's justified as "customers don't know what they want"

Isn’t customer obsession Amazon’s first leadership principal? I wonder how they justified such dark patterns?

A customer who cancels isn't really a customer anymore so it follows that they wouldn't pay too much attention to their experiences.

Tangentially related: https://scribe.rip/view-a-sku-32721d623aee

"... what if buying local was as easy as shopping at Amazon? What if you could buy local while shopping on Amazon?"

There needs to be better regulations around subscriptions. If you don’t use a subscription for 3 months you should be offered an unsubscribe link in your email that isn’t some convoluted set of dark patterns and often phone calls!

Me too, I signed up "for free" to get faster a package that ended up coming later than originally, went ahead to forget about it and caught it while I had been charged 3 months.

Does anybody have a good alternative to Amazon? I'm lazy and would like an online shop that sells everything under the sun, but is more trustworthy and with fewer moral failings.

OK, FTC. Now do WalMart's "free" delivery that they never tell you demands a tip for every delivery.

Any details available on the exact cancellation process? I recall mine being effortless. But that was Amazon Canada.

Love prime, has changed my life in Japan with easy access to just about anything delivered the next day, particularly things which are hard to come by here. Movie selection is good too.

In Japan pretty much any delivery arrives next day... the main delay is usually how long it takes the merchant to actually put a package in the mail.

Having lived in Japan, I doubt Prime has any delivery time avantage there. Next day (and sometimes same day if you live in a large city) is standard for pretty much all online fulfilment as far as I could tell.

"To cancel Prime, consumers had to... locate the "manage membership" page and press a button labeled "End Membership"... then move through multiple steps."

the horror! pressing an "end membership button"? moving through multiple steps??

i've cancelled a prime membership before. it's not that bad. why are we making consumer protection into a joke with this nonsense. feels like FTC is looking for any chance to go after a bigcorp that plays well in news headlines.

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