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The real bummer is that subscriptions aren’t centralised. Unless the user subscribes through something like iTunes or PayPal, where canceling a subscription is

The real bummer is that subscriptions aren’t centralised. Unless the user subscribes through something like iTunes or PayPal, where canceling a subscription is user-centric. The lesson here is: payment card providers need to get with the program and add a new category of charge-cancellation, specifically: user no longer wishes to continue with service, most recent charge reversed and further charges for this service blocked.

jasonkester 8y ago
Careful what you wish for. I used to use Amazon DevPay for S3stat and Twiddla subscriptions. It's "user-centric" like you describe, where users sign up for to pay for the service through Amazon, and can later tell Amazon to stop paying for it. My thing would get webhooks when those things happened so I could update my end. But it was only user-centric, so if the user asked me to cancel their subscription, I couldn't do anything except give them a link to Amazon's page to cancel. I could have a Cancel button on my site to stop my end of things, but I had to give them a link and tell them not to forget to go over to this other site and perform the necessary steps to stop sending me money. As you can imagine, it was not optimal. I ended up on the phone with Amazon too many times begging them to please stop charging my customer money and sending it to me because neither of us want that to happen, and listening to Amazon explaining patiently that that is not something they can do. No sir, write back to your customer and tell them to re-activate their Amazon subscription then visit this page and click this series of links. Stripe couldn't arrive fast enough. The day it did, my business was gone. ... and 5 years later I still had hundreds of customers who had signed up using Amazon DevPay, which doesn't have a way of transferring payment details (again, because "user-centric"), so every one of them ended up with the same professionally-embarrassing email exchange asking them to go to a 3rd party website and perform some complicated tasks that we weren't able to perform on their behalf. And sorry.
- TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
  Yeah, that’s not ideal. The service provider needs to be able to cancel as well.
Silhouette 8y ago
The lesson here is: payment card providers need to get with the program and add a new category of charge-cancellation, specifically: user no longer wishes to continue with service, most recent charge reversed and further charges for this service blocked. Why should someone's most recent charge be reversed in that scenario? If they've agreed to pay for a service and potentially been using it during the current billing period, why is it any business of the card company's to provide a facility that forcibly returns money from the merchant to the subscriber in violation of a normal subscription contract?
- TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
  Goodwill - presumably to cover the scenario where the customer didn’t get around to canceling before the end of the month.
  - Silhouette 8y ago
    As it happens, my own businesses sometimes will choose to refund under those circumstances. It does cost us a small amount every time we do it, because we still had to have resources available to provide the agreed service even if our customer decided not to use it. However, we have absolutely no obligation to do that, either ethically or legally, and I don't see why it should ever be a card company's decision rather than ours. The job of any payment service is to collect payment from a customer and give it to the merchant. It's already bad enough with chargebacks, which as any merchant can tell you are sometimes abused with the merchant losing out through no fault of their own. The idea that there should be a normal, advertised mechanism through which card companies would retrospectively pull back money paid by the customer under a legitimate contract is legally nonsensical.
    - TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
      > is legally nonsensical. I agree, and my initial iteration is probably going to far.

jasonkester 8y ago

Careful what you wish for. I used to use Amazon DevPay for S3stat and Twiddla subscriptions. It's "user-centric" like you describe, where users sign up for to pay for the service through Amazon, and can later tell Amazon to stop paying for it. My thing would get webhooks when those things happened so I could update my end. But it was only user-centric, so if the user asked me to cancel their subscription, I couldn't do anything except give them a link to Amazon's page to cancel. I could have a Cancel button on my site to stop my end of things, but I had to give them a link and tell them not to forget to go over to this other site and perform the necessary steps to stop sending me money. As you can imagine, it was not optimal. I ended up on the phone with Amazon too many times begging them to please stop charging my customer money and sending it to me because neither of us want that to happen, and listening to Amazon explaining patiently that that is not something they can do. No sir, write back to your customer and tell them to re-activate their Amazon subscription then visit this page and click this series of links. Stripe couldn't arrive fast enough. The day it did, my business was gone. ... and 5 years later I still had hundreds of customers who had signed up using Amazon DevPay, which doesn't have a way of transferring payment details (again, because "user-centric"), so every one of them ended up with the same professionally-embarrassing email exchange asking them to go to a 3rd party website and perform some complicated tasks that we weren't able to perform on their behalf. And sorry.

TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
Yeah, that’s not ideal. The service provider needs to be able to cancel as well.

Silhouette 8y ago

The lesson here is: payment card providers need to get with the program and add a new category of charge-cancellation, specifically: user no longer wishes to continue with service, most recent charge reversed and further charges for this service blocked. Why should someone's most recent charge be reversed in that scenario? If they've agreed to pay for a service and potentially been using it during the current billing period, why is it any business of the card company's to provide a facility that forcibly returns money from the merchant to the subscriber in violation of a normal subscription contract?

TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
Goodwill - presumably to cover the scenario where the customer didn’t get around to canceling before the end of the month.
- Silhouette 8y ago
  As it happens, my own businesses sometimes will choose to refund under those circumstances. It does cost us a small amount every time we do it, because we still had to have resources available to provide the agreed service even if our customer decided not to use it. However, we have absolutely no obligation to do that, either ethically or legally, and I don't see why it should ever be a card company's decision rather than ours. The job of any payment service is to collect payment from a customer and give it to the merchant. It's already bad enough with chargebacks, which as any merchant can tell you are sometimes abused with the merchant losing out through no fault of their own. The idea that there should be a normal, advertised mechanism through which card companies would retrospectively pull back money paid by the customer under a legitimate contract is legally nonsensical.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
    > is legally nonsensical. I agree, and my initial iteration is probably going to far.