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Comment by noman-land | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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 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.

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