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Comment by wilfra | Hacker News Reader

They admitted (claimed?) they had a bug and apologized for the bug. They didn't acknowledge the real mistake: converting people from free to paid without their explicit approval (not just emailing them altered terms). That needed to be opt-in, not opt-out.

It appears as though they haven't even rectified that. It's still opt out. They're going to email 71 customers asking if they want a refund. What if they don't respond? No refund, right? What about the people who got the first email but didn't cancel, they still get charged, right?

I would find it difficult to trust any company with my credit card info if I knew the only thing standing between me and new charges for things I don't want was reading every email they send me.

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They acknowledged exactly that, reversed the charges, and offered a full refund. I am again left wondering what you actually expected them to do.

I don't understand the situation of the other n-71 users. Instacart send an email to them, but apparently the users didn't have to confirm the upgrade.

What happened with the mails that got lost, went to the spam folder, where ignored because it looks like standard press release, went to the secondary mail account?

There was a post by someone who seems to have worked there claiming the mistake was when they were querying for the users to send the email to. Basically 71 of us were not included in the results of that query so the email was never actually sent to us.

Read the post again. They did not reverse the charges. They gave 71 people the opportunity to claim a refund. What they should have done was automatically issued a refund to everybody they charged - not just the 71 who didn't receive the email - because they never should have charged anybody who didn't opt-in.

Are we reading the same post? "First, we’re going to refund all delivery fees paid by the people affected by this bug."

>Second, we’re going to give these customers the choice to >either:

>Receive a full refund of the Instacart Express subscription >fee immediately >Continue as a subscriber of Instacart Express for the next >year. We’ll extend the end date of your subscription >through April 30, 2014. This option includes unlimited free >deliveries for orders over $35.

Still opt-out

Instacart Express != Delivery Fees.

"Receive a full refund of the Instacart Express subscription fee immediately"

They have an option to do that - but if they take no action, they wont receive a refund. And that only applies to the 71 users effected by the bug. The people who got the email but took no action evidently can't even claim a refund.

Can you imagine the backlash if Apple started charging $99/year for iCloud and auto-billed everybody who didn't cancel the service?

There's the other issue of the notice itself. If they decided in March to make the change, how much time did they give customers to decide? Given the timeline, it seems like it was "effective immediately" rather than giving proper ahead of time notice.

Nonetheless, even if they did discuss refunding, the entire process seems shifty. Every service I use (I checked!) warns me five business days in advance by email that they are charging my card or sends a physical mail two weeks in advance. Instacart should be sending an email on each event with the delivery fee spelled out clearly.

You can't win for losing here. A lot of people just won't read your email period. So you can either cancel the accounts of your free users and have 50% of your customer base freak out because you cancelled their account (perhaps wiping history in the process they find important) or you can keep them all active and upgrade them.

How about offering people the option to upgrade? If they decline or don't respond, they remain free users. If they accept, upgrade them.

Am I missing something?

"They remain free users"? That is an option with unlimited downside for Instacart.

They could leave their accounts dormant until the users next signed in then ask them to either accept the charges or deactivate their account. That would be a lot more ethical than just going ahead and charging them and expecting them to opt out if they don't agree to the charges.

And then someone would complain that they were ambushed for an extra $99 fee right when they just wanted to order groceries...

Well the implied assumption here is that the day of the free user is over. So it's only two options - Upgrade or leave.

>converting people from free to paid without their explicit approval

they did not convert people to paid members, they renewed existing memberships for people who had not been been notified of changes to policies of the membership.

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