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Amazon intentionally made it hard to cancel Prime subscription in secret project

345 points by green-eclipse 5y ago

Spivak 5y ago
Honestly good for Amazon getting caught saying the quiet part out loud. Maybe it will lead to some legislation banning the practice but probably not since “anything that’s good for business” is seen as some intrinsic good even if it’s at the expense of Americans.
- chiefalchemist 5y ago
  Amazon - directly and indirectly - generates a massive amount of (tax) revenue for government. It's hard to imagine W.DC, let alone state / local gov, suddenly growing teeth and a backbone. We're better off coming up with our own solution(s). Or at least trying.
aimor 5y ago
I think what's just as bad is how Amazon tries to trick users into signing up for Prime. Multiple dark patterns, it's scummy and I'm sick of getting called up by family members to help them unsubscribe.
- unsupp0rted 5y ago
  The other day I tried Prime Music and quickly discovered that my Prime subscription means I have to be advertised at every 30 seconds to upgrade to "unlimited", whatever that means. I went away back to Spotify, where I pay for a thing and get that thing (even if they keep insisting I listen to their podcasts too).
  - kingcharles 5y ago
    Right! I got a free Prime subscription, so I thought I'd check out the famed Amazon Music. Er. It was not what I expected. It is not an all-you-can-eat like Spotify or YouTube Music or Apple Music or everyone else. It's basically just a trial for their Unlimited thing that you have to pay full price to get.
fooqux 5y ago
I actually just cancelled two days ago and was shocked at how painless and easy it was. But now I have my answer why- they got caught and the pendulum swung far to the other side. Presumably. The article doesn't mention anything about Amazon changing their policies as a result of being called out. But my experience was certainly not what was described in the article- basically a single button click. Big fat edit: OK, I was wrong. This article and the other comments here made me go double check and sure enough, the cancellation didn't go through. Perhaps I fell prey to a dark pattern, but I seem to remember seeing different pages. Maybe an A/B test. Either way, good timing on posting this article!
- rapind 5y ago
  I literally canceled right now and had to confirm several times navigating identical non-cancel buttons, scrolling past several promotions that made it look like the process was over (like the ads at the end of an article) to find one of the confirmations. I mean it’s ok if you read everything expecting it to be a horrible process. There’s a lot of “if” you cancel instead of you “have” cancelled that provide hints you aren’t done yet. Fuck Amazon.
Loic 5y ago
I canceled in January. It takes several clicks through buttons and sometimes small links. It alternates the styles with negative or positive wording sentences, alternate offers. They try to convince you to get an email reminder 3 days before the renewal date instead of canceling. After you canceled, the only call to action on the confirmation page is to cancel the cancelation. You immediately get an email to easily cancel the cancelation as confirmation that you canceled. I was prepared for a dark pattern fight, I was not disappointed!
- Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
  This is where RBI's (central bank of India) e-mandate regulations are very useful, Now Amazon has to route the subscription (recurring-payments) to the issuer (bank) with explicit permission from the subscriber which are authenticated using MFA, Deductions for subscription are informed 24 hours prior by bank SMS with a cancellation link for the e-mandate. For amount > INR 5000 MFA is required for every subscription transaction. So if I want to cancel the payment to Amazon Prime subscription, All I have to do is click the link from the bank's SMS. The only drawback for now is that not all international services adhere to this e-mandate regulations and so automatic subscription payments is impossible for such services (One time payment would still work).
- dageshi 5y ago
  Yeah, I cancelled a month ago, I was impressed, I think if my parents had tried to cancel they'd have found it nearly impossible.
  - y-c-o-m-b 5y ago
    I also cancelled a month ago. It doesn't stop there though. I've ordered stuff from Amazon since then and every order still prompts me to use Prime or select it for the fastest shipping. Interestingly I'm still getting my packages on average of 2 days without Prime. The only downside is having to spend the $25 minimum for the free shipping, but I tend to buy things that exceed that price anyway.
    - 5y ago
VSerge 5y ago
I am surprised that Amazon had the gall to call this project "Iliad". I am even more surprised that anyone could consider a design decision anything else than intentional. Dark patterns are by definition intentional. Is this a question that courts or legislators are struggling with? Surely this is beyond any reasonable doubt.
- xg15 5y ago
  You can easily statistics-wash your reasoning into something that seems at first glance beneficial. If I remember Pinterest's blog post about their nag-screen correctly, the argument would go something like this: - We continuously improve the UX of our services using an empirical, data-driven approach. - One of the KPIs we optimize for is retention of Prime customers. - Our A/B tests showed that the changes introduced by Iliad significantly improved the retention rate. - Therefore we decided to roll-out the changes globally, so our whole userbase can benefit from the improvements. It's still intentionally introducing a dark pattern, but you don't have to use any ugly words anymore when taking about it...
  - hetspookjee 5y ago
    Ah yes with enough gymnastics one could end up in a paperclip maximiser situation.
    - xg15 5y ago
      A paperclip maximizer would at least have a supportable goal. I don't think that's the case here. A lot of the rethoric around "data-driven UX" just pretends that the company's goals are always perfectly aligned with the customers' - when of course in reality, they are often completely at odds. This makes it easy to talk about "improvements" and "optimisations" and make it seem like those changes would be in the interest of the users - when in reality, the changes are primarily improvements for the company. E.g. "retention" is really a poor proxy for user satisfaction. Yes, a user can stay because they like the service. They can also stay because they haven't yet found what they were looking for, because they don't know how to unsubscribe or because they are addicted. Retention doesn't care. However, what retention is a very good indicator of is how well a user can be monetized. I think, the fact that after so many years, retention is still one of the primary KPIs shows pretty well how serious the talk about "user satisfaction" really is.
gameswithgo 5y ago
Microsoft did a similar thing with XBOX live in the past. Someone had improved the UI for cancelling, and when that went live an increase in cancellations was immediately noticed by management, who then ordered that the feature be reverted.
vorpalhex 5y ago
In order to cancel your Prime subscription, you must solve the NP completeness theorem...
- HL33tibCe7 5y ago
  “To cancel your membership please send an email to $larger_factor@amazon.com, where $larger_factor is the largest prime factor of 25195908475657893494027183240048398571429282126204032027777137836043662020707595556264018525880784406918290641249515082189298559149176184502808489120072844992687392807287776735971418347270261896375014971824691165077613379859095700097330459748808428401797429100642458691817195118746121515172654632282216869987549182422433637259085141865462043576798423387184774447920739934236584823824281198163815010674810451660377306056201619676256133844143603833904414952634432190114657544454178424020924616515723350778707749817125772467962926386356373289912154831438167899885040445364023527381951378636564391212010397122822120720357“
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cooervo 5y ago
I tried it on adobe and it was a pain as well, f adobe hopefully figma steals a lot of their market
- nerdawson 5y ago
  Adobe take it to another level. Their free trial shows a monthly price if you don’t cancel but then it locks you into a 12 month contract. I nearly got stung by the same trap on ShutterStock a few weeks back.
virgilp 5y ago
Not sure if they do this, but: I signed up for prime for free, forgot to cancel, and got billed. I cancelled when I saw the charge, and then instead keeping my subscription for 1 year (or month, I don't remember), Amazon actually refunded me. Yeah they had a bunch of dark patterns, but that refund was a pleasant surprise. Hope they still do that.
- remus 5y ago
  > Yeah they had a bunch of dark patterns, but that refund was a pleasant surprise. Hope they still do that. The pessimist in me suspects they only do this to minimise the number of people who go on to complain to regulators and minimise the amount of legislative scrutiny they have to face.
  - heavenlyblue 5y ago
    Pessimist in you optimistically assumes there’s legislative scrutiny for them to face. I would argue it’s actually an optimistic thing: there’s either legislative scrutiny OR Amazon isn’t managed exclusively by assholes, either way it’s an optimistic outcome.
LVDOVICVS 5y ago
I had the same issue with other software that, after making a valid attempt to cancel, I ended up shutting off the money from the credit card. That worked.
slg 5y ago
Wierdly the aspect of this story that most annoys me is that they named the project Illiad. The Illiad was about the Trojan War. The project should have been named Odyssey after Odysseus's long and trying journey trying to get home after the war. That is the parallel to this project, the story about a seemingly easy goal that turns out to be much more diffucult and take longer than expected, not the story about the actual war.
- salawat 5y ago
  I'm so glad there are other people who notice these things like I do. Yet, you also have my condolences. It is not fun...
- hegelguy 5y ago
  Not to mention the Siren songs one endures to reach the homeland of Canceled
asimpletune 5y ago
This actually just reminded me to cancel. It wasn't super pleasant, but I was surprised to discover that I got the remainder of the year refunded to me without having to ask. So dark patterns aside, I thought that was pretty nice.
- asimpletune 5y ago
  Follow up email explains why > Since you have not used your Amazon Prime benefits, we are refunding you $129.26 which includes the full membership fee and any applicable fees and taxes. Seems fair to me
pipeline_peak 5y ago
They auto select “Subscribe & Save”, sometimes it feels like a pain just to find one time purchase. I decided to go with it for a shampoo, the delivery is so irregular it’s not even worth it. Do you know what it’s like not having shampoo because your clown ass decided to wait on Bezos?
tapatio 5y ago
I'm tired of Amazon. I cancelled Prime and switched to Walmart+. Pretty good so far!
caymanjim 5y ago
The FTC has been pushing back against "click to subscribe, call to cancel". Back in October, they released a statement against such practices, warning that they "may be illegal" or something along those lines (I can't find a good source and forget the details). From what I understand, it was a somewhat soft statement meant to serve as a warning against this dark pattern, indicating that companies may be legally liable, but not outright banning the practice. It read more like a warning shot to get companies to shape up or face stricter regulation. I wish they would take a harder stand. If you've got one-click signup and don't have one-click cancel (fine, maybe you can add in a confirmation click, or even an immediate email with a confirmation link it it), you should be fined enough to make it hurt. $10k per impacted user or whatever. Here's a random not-great article about it: https://www.birminghamtimes.com/2021/11/ftc-cracks-down-on-click-to-subscribe-call-to-cancel-billing-for-subscription-services/ https://www.birminghamtimes.com/2021/11/ftc-cracks-down-on-c.... The Economist still follows this dark pattern and it's pissing me off. I signed up for their print + digital, realized their digital content sucks, and now that I'm not commuting on mass transit anymore, I don't read the magazine enough to justify a subscription. A year later it auto-renewed because they require a phone call to cancel and I get sick of waiting on hold.
- evandale 5y ago
  I really hope this happens in Canada as well. There's a trend of these subscription services (coffee, food boxes, cat litter, etc.) that make it impossible to cancel without calling, chatting or emailing. Worse than that, they don't let you cancel, but they will suspend the service for x months. Even worse than that, they don't even allow you to remove your credit card without contacting them which really should be against some consumer protection laws. How can they keep my credit card info and not allow me to easily delete it?
  - reaperducer 5y ago
    Worse than that, they don't let you cancel, but they will suspend the service for x months Strangely, Netflix has gone in the opposite direction. At least in the U.S. Pre-pandemic, I used to occasionally put my Netflix DVD account on hold for a month or two when I would be traveling. It was no big deal. This past summer, I needed to put it on hold again, and that's no longer an option. Instead, you can only cancel the account now. Netflix holds on to your queue for six months in case you change your mind and sign up again, which worked a lot better than I thought it would. I guess Netflix has proactive lawyers and human beings for managers, instead of whatever kind Amazon has.
hnburnsy 5y ago
The Kindle has a huge dark pattern where to turn off the wifi to save the battery life, you have to turn ON Airplane mode. There is no labeled wifi switch. I am sure it is so they can keep the screen saver home page advertisement up to date. https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=GGDFGS7YKTQRS6B9 https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
- coderintherye 5y ago
  While this is a part of the terrible UI/UX of the Kindle, I highly doubt it is for keeping the ad up to date as it this is also the way it exists on ad-free Kindles. Kindle have just always had fairly poor interface decisions.
  - patmorgan23 5y ago
    Or they could just be too lazy to change it on the ad free kindles
    - beeboop 5y ago
      More likely that having different software interfaces depending on ad version is implicitly admitting they're changing something for the sake of ads
rkk3 5y ago
I cancelled the other month on impulse, to see if I'd miss it. The initial wording implied that by cancelling I'd be giving up the remaining duration I had already paid for. After closing that window and starting the process again, I got different wording that made it clear I would keep access until the renewal date. Scumbags.
gverrilla 5y ago
Adobe is masterful at this. I actually laughed at the dark patterns. These people are DISGUSTING... They may see an increase in some metrics, but I'm convinced this kind of behavior is damaging to the brand: after going through the process with Adobe, I made a very big memory note: NEVER BUY NOTHING FROM THIS COMPANY.
- limograf 5y ago
  Hard same. Adobe cheated me out of around six hundred pounds by making it freaking impossible to cancel. I finally escaped in 2021, after being devoted to Adobe for 16 years. I will never buy anything from them again. It's over now. I do miss Photoshop and After Effects but nothing is worth that nightmarish hassle. Da Vinci, Affinity, Fusion, Smoke... there are other options.
  - oo0shiny 5y ago
    Can't recommend https://www.photopea.com/ https://www.photopea.com/ enough. Free Photoshop alternative in the browser. Works for all the small edits I tend to do.
fsh 5y ago
I really wonder which effects this kind of user-hostile behavior has on the long term success of a company. This is probably impossible to measure since there is no second Amazon to compare with. I guess some execs were asked or incentivized to optimize one particular metric (number of Prime cancellations), and this is exactly what they did.
supergeek133 5y ago
Having a link or ability to cancel online (even with strange language or hard to navigate) is still better than cancelling your Comcast or newspaper/ESPN subscription. Sadly.
mdonahoe 5y ago
What's the latest in virtual credit card numbers? I've seen these services advertised, but I haven't tried one yet. I'd love to be able to "cancel" a subscription service by just deleting my card and stopping automated payments. It would be nice if I was then not legally obligated to pay any outstanding bills, but I doubt I would win that fight, so I question how good these cards are in practice. Has anyone tried one?
- amelius 5y ago
  Isn't it easy to cancel with a normal credit card?
- Shank 5y ago
  Privacy works, but you should be aware that without attempting to cancel on the service, some providers get really angry. I tried and failed to cancel NYT, and they force-posted [0] a subscription renewal despite getting declines on the card. In other words, it didn't matter that the card was paused or that they didn't get authorization, they still tried to post the transaction. I don't necessarily expect this from every service, but it certainly wasn't as painless as I thought it was going to be with a virtual card number. [0]: https://support.privacy.com/hc/en-us/articles/360012288214-Force-posts https://support.privacy.com/hc/en-us/articles/360012288214-F...
  - guntars 5y ago
    Ah, great to know that the merchants have another tool to take whatever money they feel entitled to from my account based on nothing more than "but we really really want to!" My first introduction to credit cards, when I was a kid, was via some.. uh.. shared CC numbers online. I couldn't believe how insecure the whole system was. Were people just that naive back in the day?
- cyberlurker 5y ago
  Privacy.com is fantastic
- nyuszika7h 5y ago
  Most services will just give up trying to charge you and cancel your subscription after a few failed attempts, but I had a bad experience with BritBox a few years ago. I signed up for a trial with a Revolut card that barely had any balance and forgot to cancel, and then to my surprise when the trial ended a "delayed transaction" appeared in Revolut, and they overdrafted me. There was absolutely no mention of this when signing up for the trial, I only saw a $0 authorization charge.
archhn 5y ago
When I canceled, a prompt came up that said something which made me feel like I was an idiot for canceling. Something like "Are you sure you want to miss out on all the great benefits of prime?" [YES/NO]. When I pressed yes, I felt like I had to buy into their premise that prime offered me great value...which made me feel like a fool. Honestly, I am more entertained by the psychological manipulation of the corporations than anything at this point. Last week I bought a water bottle at a chain supermarket with a sticker on it that read, "We want to be your friend! Follow us on Facebook." I just laughed at the thought that a water bottle is trying to befriend me on behalf of a corporation. "Welcome to Costco, I love you." inbound.
Julesman 5y ago
This is absolutely generic common practice, to one degree or another. Facebook is great at this crap. Clearly this example crosses some kind of line to people. But maybe more than anything because we got to see how the sausage is made. It's as open a secret as the fact that automated call handling is about intentional friction to limit needed call staff.
steviedotboston 5y ago
I tried to cancel a month or so ago and couldn't figure it out so opened a support chat.
pinkhorse 5y ago
Lol Customer Obession
HL33tibCe7 5y ago
Amazon love to talk about being “customer-obsessed”, but this little slip of the mask is pretty stark evidence of the opposite: that they have contempt for their customers and simply see them as cash cows to milk. Maybe most people won’t care, but this has put me off subscribing to any Amazon service in future.
- floren 5y ago
  They're definitely customer-obsessed... have you ever seen the movie "Misery"?
- pie42000 5y ago
  Uhhh, what part of "customer-obsessed" implies anything positive to you? Drug dealers are also "customer-obsessed". Notice how Amazon is customer-obsessed and not "obsessed with providing a great, ethical, and non-addictive experience for our customers". They are upfront that they will do anything and everything to acquire more customers and extract as much from each customer as possible. This has been clear to anyone for at least half of a decade
cronix 5y ago
I also love that they now have "subscribe" as the default option for purchasing things and you have to manually select "one time" to only purchase once.
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paxys 5y ago
"Secret project" as opposed to every other feature in development at the company that is 100% public? I get that it is a shitty move, but let's not make it sound overdramatic for no reason.
- qgin 5y ago
  Very sensationalized.
AlphaGeekZulu 5y ago
In Germany a new law will take effect on July 1st 2022, that obligates online shops to provide an "easily accessible, clearly visible" cancellation button on their websites, that allows to cancel any contract that has been established online or via App. The entire procedure is described very explicitly in the law and breaks down to a 2-step process: 1. mandatory cancellation button, which, if pressed, leads to a 2. confirmation page, where a defined set of parameters is requested and a confirmation button then cancels the contract. In my eyes the defined set of parameters on the confirmation page can easily been abused to make the process more difficult for the user. The parameters required are: 1. Type of cancellation 2. Unique identification of the user 3. Unique identification of the contract 4. The desired end date of the contract 5. Means of electronic communication for cancellation confirmation (email) Topic 2 can be made very difficult and is in my eyes superficial - if the user logged into his account, he is identified IMO. Topic 3 is ambivalent, how do you identify an contract? By title and date, by ID? In my eyes there should be a popup with existing contracts to choose from (which can easily be done if the user is logged in). Topic 4 is prone to errors, because many contracts have notice periods. So the user has to do research on his contract and if he gets the lifetime/notice periods wrong his cancellation will fail. Information (unfortunately only in german): https://www.voelker-gruppe.com/stuttgart/kuendigungsschaltflaeche/ https://www.voelker-gruppe.com/stuttgart/kuendigungsschaltfl...
- Osiris 5y ago
  And this is why regulating companies is hard. It's difficult to word things in a way that's generic enough to cover many businesses while at the same time not leaving big loopholes.
  - amyjess 5y ago
    See, I'd approach it a different way. Don't even give them the option of building their own UI. Require all companies who provide any kind of subscription service to implement specific API hooks that interact with a government portal. Specify the API endpoints, their expected payloads, and the resultant behaviors in excruciating detail (use formal methods if needed) and require that they send the API tokens to a specific secure endpoint controlled by the government. And the standard way of cancelling your service will be to log into the government portal, browse the list of subscription services you're subscribed to until you find what you're looking to cancel, click the checkbox next to it, and click 'Unsubscribe'. And the government portal will send an authenticated request to the company's legally-mandated cancel API and the cancel request, by law, must immediately result in automated total purging of the user's account with the company within 10 seconds of receiving the request.
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daenz 5y ago
Related, yesterday I tried to cancel my Kindle Unlimited trial. I found the page easily enough, but when I clicked cancel, I received an "400 Oops!" page. Then attempting to visit the original page at all resulted in "400 Oops!" I waited for some time to pass and was still unable to cancel. I nearly forgot about it, but a few hours later, I tried again and it succeeded. Now, I know it's slightly paranoid to assume that it wasn't just a bug preventing me from canceling, but at the scale Amazon operates at, and the SLAs they shoot for, what are the odds that it would occur at the moment I try to cancel? To the conspiracy theorist side of me, it felt like a dark pattern. In my mind, the lengths that Amazon would go to to prevent Prime cancellations adds more suspicion about my Kindle Unlimited cancellation experience.
- wccrawford 5y ago
  I recently canceled my Kindle Unlimited subscription as well, and experienced no issues other than the "dark patterns" already outlined in other posts here. I know it's a massive coincidence that that happened to you, but I really do think it was just a coincidence. If it happened too often, people would be screaming about it on social media in no time.
MarkSweep 5y ago
There should be a rule that the percentage of people who successfully cancel and the time it takes them to do so has to be the same or better than the signup process.
lotsofpulp 5y ago
Amazon introduced a dark pattern to try to get you to accept your refund in the form of Amazon store credit rather than back to your original payment method. On my iOS device, going to Amazon.com in safari, I initiated the return, and then the question of how I want to process the return came up, and the top 3 or 4 options all resulted in me not getting my money back. The option to refund to original payment method was all the way at the bottom (had to scroll), and in a different color/formatting such that it took me effort to recognize it as an option. My parents and their ilk would have no chance against this kind of nonsense.
buzzdenver 5y ago
I happened to cancel my Prime earlier this morning. They do make you click through a few pages. They validated my decision by showing how many free prime orders I had, and it'd come out to a wash even if I paid to expedite all of them. Most of the time I would be fine waiting a few days. As a bright spot they had the option to keep enjoying Prime benefits until my membership actually expires. It really pisses me off when companies only have the option to "cancel right now" and forego the membership that you already paid for.
philliphaydon 5y ago
This is why I don’t want apple to support other payment processors on iOS. I signed up on my phone and so cancelling is easy. The moment the payments are done by a 3rd party this will be difficult again.
registeredcorn 5y ago
Wow. Who would have thought that a company known for treating employees horribly would also treat customers horribly?
prytania 5y ago
File this under ‘not a story’. Every subscription service ever tries to convince you to stay before cancellation. At least you don’t have to ‘email support’ or call as I’ve had to do in the past. The meal delivery services are the worst of the worst when it comes to this
SubiculumCode 5y ago
I canceled prime, but they make it super easy to accidentally resign up for it when ordering.
testplzignore 5y ago
Are there services that are easier to cancel than Prime? I don't use many online suscription services, so I don't know. Of the services I have used, Twitch is the easiest. Prime takes more clicks, but its just a few extra seconds. Maybe I find it easy because I've canceled so many free trials. A dark pattern I really hate is when you have to use the desktop version of a website to change certain settings or cancel.
- AlexandrB 5y ago
  Anything using Apple's subscription management is easier. It's one reason why many rush to defend Apple's restrictive App Store policies whenever the subject comes up.
  - mardifoufs 5y ago
    Yeah same for android. I get that fees are high and the play store has it's issues... BuI still always try to subscribe through the store just to avoid the trouble of having to track down subscriptions. The price is also much more transparent, so there's no bait and switch between annual/monthly prices. The ideal would be to have a a website like privacy.com here in Canada but there's no service or even bank that allows you to have disposable credit cards. I wonder if it's due to regulatory differences
- chihuahua 5y ago
  Netflix and Zwift are easy to cancel.
ccn0p 5y ago
is this even surprising? anyone else notice how when returning something for a refund, the refund option to actually return your money is a hard-to-see link unlike the other options? it might even be a little javascript click away if I recall. the perfect example of interfacing your cash into their pockets.
jquast 5y ago
Pretty certain I was a part of their experiment, not Prime related, I just wished to close my account entirely. They kept replying that "someone will contact you in 24-48 hours", but nobody would. I got more aggressive each cycle, waiting 3 days, 2 days, then 1 day, the process was cyclical, I could not close the account. When I changed my name to "FUCK AMAZON" my request was immediately processed, prior comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23720203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23720203
lfkdev 5y ago
surprise?
edmcnulty101 5y ago
I use Privacy.com to help with this kind of dark pattern B.S.
nvr219 5y ago
I don't know about canceling Prime, but I did delete my account a couple of years ago and I remember that process being much easier than I expected. Didn't have to call anyone, for example (like some other companies).
seandoe 5y ago
In other news, water is wet.
patwolf 5y ago
I suspect Amazon uses a lot of dark patterns. Multiple times I've discovered that I'm subscribed to some Amazon digital subscription that I had no idea about. I do read my credit card statements every month, but there are enough Amazon purchases on there that I don't notice a small monthly subscription charge. When I've tried to cancel them, it takes me through a confusing series of dialogs that I have to read very carefully to make sure I'm doing the correct thing.
zitterbewegung 5y ago
How was this secret unless your haven’t tried to cancel your prime membership ? Or was that dark pattern shown to people at random?
ineedasername 5y ago
Amazon has a bad history in dealing with ToS for Prime in general. In the beginning Prime was about free 2-day shipping and $3.99 next-day shipping, and was written into the ToS. Then one time I wanted to ship something next-day and the charge was going to be $8.99. I was curious about when it had changed, and what the rules were: but the current ToS didn't specify a particular price, and I couldn't find any notification from Amazon about the change, so I went digging in Wayback. To cut things short, at some point Amazon changed the ToS, removing the requirement that they notify customers of future changes, while the $3.99 price remained the same. Then, at some point in the future, Amazon removed the $3.99 guarantee but was no longer required to notify customers that they'd now be paying more for that service. Very sneaky.
jeppester 5y ago
Hopefully it will turn out to be a very shortsighted strategy. I for one am not going to sign up again. Still, there should be a rule that cancelling must be at least as easy as signing up.
foolproofplan 5y ago
I asked to cancel my subscription once in a chat and they just flat out ignored my request although they said they would. I'm sure amazon has all sorts of scummy ways.
acdanger 5y ago
I worked for a big bank building out the software the call center agents used to service customers. One of the changes that was requested from on high was to make the UI around free shipping for replacement bank cards intentionally painful for the agent to use. The hope was that the agents wouldn't mention the free shipping option or talk the customer out of it since it added some annoyances for the agent.
dopa42365 5y ago
Recently canceled my Prime (nothing wrong with it, but I don't buy enough stuff to actually save money on shipping etc), it took like 20 seconds and 5 clicks, whatever. Hate the game, not the players.
mzvkxlcvd 5y ago
I have a different interesting "problem". I have prime and I don't know why. No one is paying for it, but i get prime shipping on everything. If i try to look at my prime settings i have the option to sign up for prime. not complaining though.
icedistilled 5y ago
I did a prime trial and then cancelled it... only to get a bill a bit later for prime. My account showed cancelled, I did not have active prime. I had to call in and the phone help explained that the auto bill option was checked... Nowhere on my side of the UI was an auto bill option shown and in what bizarro logic would auto bill stay active after cancelling?
sydthrowaway 5y ago
Amazon and Dropbox need to be sanctioned for this dark pattern shit
awinter-py 5y ago
one future here is for gov to mandate 'dark pattern-prone' biz processes to be handled by open APIs or third parties like email client's 'unsubscribe' button but for everything designing this feature would be a natural fit for apple if they were actually pro consumer rights, rather than trying to destroy, then become, facebook
ozzythecat 5y ago
Anyone whose worked at amazon isn’t going to be surprised by this. Much of Amazon’s retail/consumer organization is heavily product management driven. PMs are under pressure and incentivized to release features or somehow show impact that translates into some bottom line metric. If you can show your work attributed X% decrease in cancellations or Y% increase in bottom line profit, especially with a small engineering team, that’s your fastest path to promotion. This leads to a culture of churning out “features”, often at the expense of the end product or the expense of customers. I guarantee you there were a/b test results that were summarized and twisted around in a document, presenting the test results as a net win for customers. And there are second and third order effects - constant tweaks and duct tape on top of monolithic systems that prevent Amazon from being innovative. The company makes shockingly little investment in this area, and when you couple that with engineers constantly churning, it becomes clear that product teams deliver some dark pattern or other unhelpful feature because the poorly strung together architecture limits any real innovation. The engineers may have their own opinions, but at the end of the day nobody gives a shit about what they think except on design and scale concerns. What’s the operational/support cost of X? If we promise Y to our leadership, can we deliver it by this date? Most of the recent hiring when I left, especially for engineers, were study abroad students from China or India. They wouldn’t say anything being afraid not to rock the boat, especially because of their work situation. If a manager puts them on a development plan, they will most likely get fired and have to leave the US. The company has found this structure so advantageous to its business that if not for Indian and Chinese talent, in my opinion, Amazon in its current cultural state would implode.
- deanCommie 5y ago
  > PMs are under pressure and incentivized to release features or somehow show impact that translates into some bottom line metric. So are PMs at all companies?
Animats 5y ago
Just buying from Amazon without using Prime requires getting past three dark patterns. "No, I don't want free delivery" is one of them. Amazon still offers "free delivery" without Prime, but the web site gives you a date further in the future. In practice, they usually deliver faster than that. There are dark patterns to keep you away from that option, but it works fine. I don't have Prime and haven't paid for Amazon delivery in a long time.
- skydhash 5y ago
  I guess they use farther warehouses when doing free delivery without prime. I bought a keyboard on Wednesday and they said Monday. On Thursday, it was still being processed, so I just paid the next-day delivery ($10), and the progress rewinds back to the beginning, so I think they switched warehouses.
giords 5y ago
NordVPN is pretty hard to cancel as well
deanCommie 5y ago
Here's a more charitable interpretation to consider that's not "Mwahaha let's make it impossible for people to cancel Prime so we can make more money": "We have worked hard to make Prime a good deal for customers. But we also know that a lot of customers don't know about the benefits. They just know that if they sign up for Prime they can get free shipping. So they do so and then they cancel. Are we sure that customers know about all the benefits that they get from Prime before they cancel? Maybe if they did, they would not be so hasty. Do they know about Music and Photos and Video? Maybe if they did, they'd keep it around. Let's show them the options during the cancellation flow to make sure they REALLY know what they're giving up. And let's flip around the yes/no buttons to make sure they actually read it - similar to what security confirmation messages do when you're about to do something irreversible."
DarkContinent 5y ago
Is Amazon even the hardest place to cancel your membership? Udacity for instance required me to talk to a person to cancel a $400/month subscription.
dorgo 5y ago
I subscribe/unsubscribe every other month. Depends on whether there is something interesting on prime or netflix. From time to time I get a free month or a week for 1€. Just canceled my free month. Rule of thumb is to never click the button you would click when drunk. They changed something. I had to allow amazon.dev in ublock origin.
azalemeth 5y ago
I've never really understood the value proposition of Prime. Spend a lot more money monthly so that you can... Spend more money with free shipping attached, and get some (variable quality) videos thrown in for free?
- mft_ 5y ago
  It’s genius, in a slightly dark manner. I/we bought a new house a couple of years ago and have obviously needed lots of different stuff, large and small, as a result. Our choice of local shops is relatively restricted and I’d estimate that >90% of everything bought online (by volume) has been from Amazon - it’s fast, free, and reliable. That Prime subscription pays for itself several times over in postage costs saved, before you consider any of the other relative perks it brings. It’s an enabler - and means that Amazon is your first choice to look for something you need, before any other site. If you want to look at it purely mathematically, I find that typical postage from an independent online retailer costs ~€4 for something by small. So if I purchase more than 2-3 items per month, the cost of Prime is already earned back.
hacknews20 5y ago
It’s a devious click and switch game. It’s tricked and continues to trick many a person, not least the old and vulnerable. It’s a form of evil cynicism.

345 points by green-eclipse 5y ago

Honestly good for Amazon getting caught saying the quiet part out loud. Maybe it will lead to some legislation banning the practice but probably not since “anything that’s good for business” is seen as some intrinsic good even if it’s at the expense of Americans.

chiefalchemist 5y ago
Amazon - directly and indirectly - generates a massive amount of (tax) revenue for government. It's hard to imagine W.DC, let alone state / local gov, suddenly growing teeth and a backbone. We're better off coming up with our own solution(s). Or at least trying.

aimor 5y ago

I think what's just as bad is how Amazon tries to trick users into signing up for Prime. Multiple dark patterns, it's scummy and I'm sick of getting called up by family members to help them unsubscribe.

unsupp0rted 5y ago
The other day I tried Prime Music and quickly discovered that my Prime subscription means I have to be advertised at every 30 seconds to upgrade to "unlimited", whatever that means. I went away back to Spotify, where I pay for a thing and get that thing (even if they keep insisting I listen to their podcasts too).
- kingcharles 5y ago
  Right! I got a free Prime subscription, so I thought I'd check out the famed Amazon Music. Er. It was not what I expected. It is not an all-you-can-eat like Spotify or YouTube Music or Apple Music or everyone else. It's basically just a trial for their Unlimited thing that you have to pay full price to get.

fooqux 5y ago

I actually just cancelled two days ago and was shocked at how painless and easy it was. But now I have my answer why- they got caught and the pendulum swung far to the other side. Presumably. The article doesn't mention anything about Amazon changing their policies as a result of being called out. But my experience was certainly not what was described in the article- basically a single button click. Big fat edit: OK, I was wrong. This article and the other comments here made me go double check and sure enough, the cancellation didn't go through. Perhaps I fell prey to a dark pattern, but I seem to remember seeing different pages. Maybe an A/B test. Either way, good timing on posting this article!

rapind 5y ago
I literally canceled right now and had to confirm several times navigating identical non-cancel buttons, scrolling past several promotions that made it look like the process was over (like the ads at the end of an article) to find one of the confirmations. I mean it’s ok if you read everything expecting it to be a horrible process. There’s a lot of “if” you cancel instead of you “have” cancelled that provide hints you aren’t done yet. Fuck Amazon.

Loic 5y ago

I canceled in January. It takes several clicks through buttons and sometimes small links. It alternates the styles with negative or positive wording sentences, alternate offers. They try to convince you to get an email reminder 3 days before the renewal date instead of canceling. After you canceled, the only call to action on the confirmation page is to cancel the cancelation. You immediately get an email to easily cancel the cancelation as confirmation that you canceled. I was prepared for a dark pattern fight, I was not disappointed!

Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
This is where RBI's (central bank of India) e-mandate regulations are very useful, Now Amazon has to route the subscription (recurring-payments) to the issuer (bank) with explicit permission from the subscriber which are authenticated using MFA, Deductions for subscription are informed 24 hours prior by bank SMS with a cancellation link for the e-mandate. For amount > INR 5000 MFA is required for every subscription transaction. So if I want to cancel the payment to Amazon Prime subscription, All I have to do is click the link from the bank's SMS. The only drawback for now is that not all international services adhere to this e-mandate regulations and so automatic subscription payments is impossible for such services (One time payment would still work).
dageshi 5y ago
Yeah, I cancelled a month ago, I was impressed, I think if my parents had tried to cancel they'd have found it nearly impossible.
- y-c-o-m-b 5y ago
  I also cancelled a month ago. It doesn't stop there though. I've ordered stuff from Amazon since then and every order still prompts me to use Prime or select it for the fastest shipping. Interestingly I'm still getting my packages on average of 2 days without Prime. The only downside is having to spend the $25 minimum for the free shipping, but I tend to buy things that exceed that price anyway.
  - 5y ago

VSerge 5y ago

I am surprised that Amazon had the gall to call this project "Iliad". I am even more surprised that anyone could consider a design decision anything else than intentional. Dark patterns are by definition intentional. Is this a question that courts or legislators are struggling with? Surely this is beyond any reasonable doubt.

xg15 5y ago
You can easily statistics-wash your reasoning into something that seems at first glance beneficial. If I remember Pinterest's blog post about their nag-screen correctly, the argument would go something like this: - We continuously improve the UX of our services using an empirical, data-driven approach. - One of the KPIs we optimize for is retention of Prime customers. - Our A/B tests showed that the changes introduced by Iliad significantly improved the retention rate. - Therefore we decided to roll-out the changes globally, so our whole userbase can benefit from the improvements. It's still intentionally introducing a dark pattern, but you don't have to use any ugly words anymore when taking about it...
- hetspookjee 5y ago
  Ah yes with enough gymnastics one could end up in a paperclip maximiser situation.
  - xg15 5y ago
    A paperclip maximizer would at least have a supportable goal. I don't think that's the case here. A lot of the rethoric around "data-driven UX" just pretends that the company's goals are always perfectly aligned with the customers' - when of course in reality, they are often completely at odds. This makes it easy to talk about "improvements" and "optimisations" and make it seem like those changes would be in the interest of the users - when in reality, the changes are primarily improvements for the company. E.g. "retention" is really a poor proxy for user satisfaction. Yes, a user can stay because they like the service. They can also stay because they haven't yet found what they were looking for, because they don't know how to unsubscribe or because they are addicted. Retention doesn't care. However, what retention is a very good indicator of is how well a user can be monetized. I think, the fact that after so many years, retention is still one of the primary KPIs shows pretty well how serious the talk about "user satisfaction" really is.

gameswithgo 5y ago

Microsoft did a similar thing with XBOX live in the past. Someone had improved the UI for cancelling, and when that went live an increase in cancellations was immediately noticed by management, who then ordered that the feature be reverted.

vorpalhex 5y ago

In order to cancel your Prime subscription, you must solve the NP completeness theorem...

HL33tibCe7 5y ago
“To cancel your membership please send an email to $larger_factor@amazon.com, where $larger_factor is the largest prime factor of 25195908475657893494027183240048398571429282126204032027777137836043662020707595556264018525880784406918290641249515082189298559149176184502808489120072844992687392807287776735971418347270261896375014971824691165077613379859095700097330459748808428401797429100642458691817195118746121515172654632282216869987549182422433637259085141865462043576798423387184774447920739934236584823824281198163815010674810451660377306056201619676256133844143603833904414952634432190114657544454178424020924616515723350778707749817125772467962926386356373289912154831438167899885040445364023527381951378636564391212010397122822120720357“

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cooervo 5y ago

I tried it on adobe and it was a pain as well, f adobe hopefully figma steals a lot of their market

nerdawson 5y ago
Adobe take it to another level. Their free trial shows a monthly price if you don’t cancel but then it locks you into a 12 month contract. I nearly got stung by the same trap on ShutterStock a few weeks back.

virgilp 5y ago

Not sure if they do this, but: I signed up for prime for free, forgot to cancel, and got billed. I cancelled when I saw the charge, and then instead keeping my subscription for 1 year (or month, I don't remember), Amazon actually refunded me. Yeah they had a bunch of dark patterns, but that refund was a pleasant surprise. Hope they still do that.

remus 5y ago
> Yeah they had a bunch of dark patterns, but that refund was a pleasant surprise. Hope they still do that. The pessimist in me suspects they only do this to minimise the number of people who go on to complain to regulators and minimise the amount of legislative scrutiny they have to face.
- heavenlyblue 5y ago
  Pessimist in you optimistically assumes there’s legislative scrutiny for them to face. I would argue it’s actually an optimistic thing: there’s either legislative scrutiny OR Amazon isn’t managed exclusively by assholes, either way it’s an optimistic outcome.

LVDOVICVS 5y ago

I had the same issue with other software that, after making a valid attempt to cancel, I ended up shutting off the money from the credit card. That worked.

slg 5y ago

Wierdly the aspect of this story that most annoys me is that they named the project Illiad. The Illiad was about the Trojan War. The project should have been named Odyssey after Odysseus's long and trying journey trying to get home after the war. That is the parallel to this project, the story about a seemingly easy goal that turns out to be much more diffucult and take longer than expected, not the story about the actual war.

salawat 5y ago
I'm so glad there are other people who notice these things like I do. Yet, you also have my condolences. It is not fun...
hegelguy 5y ago
Not to mention the Siren songs one endures to reach the homeland of Canceled

asimpletune 5y ago

This actually just reminded me to cancel. It wasn't super pleasant, but I was surprised to discover that I got the remainder of the year refunded to me without having to ask. So dark patterns aside, I thought that was pretty nice.

asimpletune 5y ago
Follow up email explains why > Since you have not used your Amazon Prime benefits, we are refunding you $129.26 which includes the full membership fee and any applicable fees and taxes. Seems fair to me

pipeline_peak 5y ago

They auto select “Subscribe & Save”, sometimes it feels like a pain just to find one time purchase. I decided to go with it for a shampoo, the delivery is so irregular it’s not even worth it. Do you know what it’s like not having shampoo because your clown ass decided to wait on Bezos?

tapatio 5y ago

I'm tired of Amazon. I cancelled Prime and switched to Walmart+. Pretty good so far!

caymanjim 5y ago

The FTC has been pushing back against "click to subscribe, call to cancel". Back in October, they released a statement against such practices, warning that they "may be illegal" or something along those lines (I can't find a good source and forget the details). From what I understand, it was a somewhat soft statement meant to serve as a warning against this dark pattern, indicating that companies may be legally liable, but not outright banning the practice. It read more like a warning shot to get companies to shape up or face stricter regulation. I wish they would take a harder stand. If you've got one-click signup and don't have one-click cancel (fine, maybe you can add in a confirmation click, or even an immediate email with a confirmation link it it), you should be fined enough to make it hurt. $10k per impacted user or whatever. Here's a random not-great article about it: https://www.birminghamtimes.com/2021/11/ftc-cracks-down-on-click-to-subscribe-call-to-cancel-billing-for-subscription-services/ https://www.birminghamtimes.com/2021/11/ftc-cracks-down-on-c.... The Economist still follows this dark pattern and it's pissing me off. I signed up for their print + digital, realized their digital content sucks, and now that I'm not commuting on mass transit anymore, I don't read the magazine enough to justify a subscription. A year later it auto-renewed because they require a phone call to cancel and I get sick of waiting on hold.

evandale 5y ago
I really hope this happens in Canada as well. There's a trend of these subscription services (coffee, food boxes, cat litter, etc.) that make it impossible to cancel without calling, chatting or emailing. Worse than that, they don't let you cancel, but they will suspend the service for x months. Even worse than that, they don't even allow you to remove your credit card without contacting them which really should be against some consumer protection laws. How can they keep my credit card info and not allow me to easily delete it?
- reaperducer 5y ago
  Worse than that, they don't let you cancel, but they will suspend the service for x months Strangely, Netflix has gone in the opposite direction. At least in the U.S. Pre-pandemic, I used to occasionally put my Netflix DVD account on hold for a month or two when I would be traveling. It was no big deal. This past summer, I needed to put it on hold again, and that's no longer an option. Instead, you can only cancel the account now. Netflix holds on to your queue for six months in case you change your mind and sign up again, which worked a lot better than I thought it would. I guess Netflix has proactive lawyers and human beings for managers, instead of whatever kind Amazon has.

hnburnsy 5y ago

The Kindle has a huge dark pattern where to turn off the wifi to save the battery life, you have to turn ON Airplane mode. There is no labeled wifi switch. I am sure it is so they can keep the screen saver home page advertisement up to date. https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=GGDFGS7YKTQRS6B9 https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...

coderintherye 5y ago
While this is a part of the terrible UI/UX of the Kindle, I highly doubt it is for keeping the ad up to date as it this is also the way it exists on ad-free Kindles. Kindle have just always had fairly poor interface decisions.
- patmorgan23 5y ago
  Or they could just be too lazy to change it on the ad free kindles
  - beeboop 5y ago
    More likely that having different software interfaces depending on ad version is implicitly admitting they're changing something for the sake of ads

rkk3 5y ago

I cancelled the other month on impulse, to see if I'd miss it. The initial wording implied that by cancelling I'd be giving up the remaining duration I had already paid for. After closing that window and starting the process again, I got different wording that made it clear I would keep access until the renewal date. Scumbags.

gverrilla 5y ago

Adobe is masterful at this. I actually laughed at the dark patterns. These people are DISGUSTING... They may see an increase in some metrics, but I'm convinced this kind of behavior is damaging to the brand: after going through the process with Adobe, I made a very big memory note: NEVER BUY NOTHING FROM THIS COMPANY.

limograf 5y ago
Hard same. Adobe cheated me out of around six hundred pounds by making it freaking impossible to cancel. I finally escaped in 2021, after being devoted to Adobe for 16 years. I will never buy anything from them again. It's over now. I do miss Photoshop and After Effects but nothing is worth that nightmarish hassle. Da Vinci, Affinity, Fusion, Smoke... there are other options.
- oo0shiny 5y ago
  Can't recommend https://www.photopea.com/ https://www.photopea.com/ enough. Free Photoshop alternative in the browser. Works for all the small edits I tend to do.

fsh 5y ago

I really wonder which effects this kind of user-hostile behavior has on the long term success of a company. This is probably impossible to measure since there is no second Amazon to compare with. I guess some execs were asked or incentivized to optimize one particular metric (number of Prime cancellations), and this is exactly what they did.

supergeek133 5y ago

Having a link or ability to cancel online (even with strange language or hard to navigate) is still better than cancelling your Comcast or newspaper/ESPN subscription. Sadly.

mdonahoe 5y ago

What's the latest in virtual credit card numbers? I've seen these services advertised, but I haven't tried one yet. I'd love to be able to "cancel" a subscription service by just deleting my card and stopping automated payments. It would be nice if I was then not legally obligated to pay any outstanding bills, but I doubt I would win that fight, so I question how good these cards are in practice. Has anyone tried one?

amelius 5y ago
Isn't it easy to cancel with a normal credit card?
Shank 5y ago
Privacy works, but you should be aware that without attempting to cancel on the service, some providers get really angry. I tried and failed to cancel NYT, and they force-posted [0] a subscription renewal despite getting declines on the card. In other words, it didn't matter that the card was paused or that they didn't get authorization, they still tried to post the transaction. I don't necessarily expect this from every service, but it certainly wasn't as painless as I thought it was going to be with a virtual card number. [0]: https://support.privacy.com/hc/en-us/articles/360012288214-Force-posts https://support.privacy.com/hc/en-us/articles/360012288214-F...
- guntars 5y ago
  Ah, great to know that the merchants have another tool to take whatever money they feel entitled to from my account based on nothing more than "but we really really want to!" My first introduction to credit cards, when I was a kid, was via some.. uh.. shared CC numbers online. I couldn't believe how insecure the whole system was. Were people just that naive back in the day?
cyberlurker 5y ago
Privacy.com is fantastic
nyuszika7h 5y ago
Most services will just give up trying to charge you and cancel your subscription after a few failed attempts, but I had a bad experience with BritBox a few years ago. I signed up for a trial with a Revolut card that barely had any balance and forgot to cancel, and then to my surprise when the trial ended a "delayed transaction" appeared in Revolut, and they overdrafted me. There was absolutely no mention of this when signing up for the trial, I only saw a $0 authorization charge.

archhn 5y ago

When I canceled, a prompt came up that said something which made me feel like I was an idiot for canceling. Something like "Are you sure you want to miss out on all the great benefits of prime?" [YES/NO]. When I pressed yes, I felt like I had to buy into their premise that prime offered me great value...which made me feel like a fool. Honestly, I am more entertained by the psychological manipulation of the corporations than anything at this point. Last week I bought a water bottle at a chain supermarket with a sticker on it that read, "We want to be your friend! Follow us on Facebook." I just laughed at the thought that a water bottle is trying to befriend me on behalf of a corporation. "Welcome to Costco, I love you." inbound.

Julesman 5y ago

This is absolutely generic common practice, to one degree or another. Facebook is great at this crap. Clearly this example crosses some kind of line to people. But maybe more than anything because we got to see how the sausage is made. It's as open a secret as the fact that automated call handling is about intentional friction to limit needed call staff.

steviedotboston 5y ago

I tried to cancel a month or so ago and couldn't figure it out so opened a support chat.

pinkhorse 5y ago

Lol Customer Obession

HL33tibCe7 5y ago

Amazon love to talk about being “customer-obsessed”, but this little slip of the mask is pretty stark evidence of the opposite: that they have contempt for their customers and simply see them as cash cows to milk. Maybe most people won’t care, but this has put me off subscribing to any Amazon service in future.

floren 5y ago
They're definitely customer-obsessed... have you ever seen the movie "Misery"?
pie42000 5y ago
Uhhh, what part of "customer-obsessed" implies anything positive to you? Drug dealers are also "customer-obsessed". Notice how Amazon is customer-obsessed and not "obsessed with providing a great, ethical, and non-addictive experience for our customers". They are upfront that they will do anything and everything to acquire more customers and extract as much from each customer as possible. This has been clear to anyone for at least half of a decade

cronix 5y ago

I also love that they now have "subscribe" as the default option for purchasing things and you have to manually select "one time" to only purchase once.

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paxys 5y ago

"Secret project" as opposed to every other feature in development at the company that is 100% public? I get that it is a shitty move, but let's not make it sound overdramatic for no reason.

qgin 5y ago
Very sensationalized.

AlphaGeekZulu 5y ago

In Germany a new law will take effect on July 1st 2022, that obligates online shops to provide an "easily accessible, clearly visible" cancellation button on their websites, that allows to cancel any contract that has been established online or via App. The entire procedure is described very explicitly in the law and breaks down to a 2-step process: 1. mandatory cancellation button, which, if pressed, leads to a 2. confirmation page, where a defined set of parameters is requested and a confirmation button then cancels the contract. In my eyes the defined set of parameters on the confirmation page can easily been abused to make the process more difficult for the user. The parameters required are: 1. Type of cancellation 2. Unique identification of the user 3. Unique identification of the contract 4. The desired end date of the contract 5. Means of electronic communication for cancellation confirmation (email) Topic 2 can be made very difficult and is in my eyes superficial - if the user logged into his account, he is identified IMO. Topic 3 is ambivalent, how do you identify an contract? By title and date, by ID? In my eyes there should be a popup with existing contracts to choose from (which can easily be done if the user is logged in). Topic 4 is prone to errors, because many contracts have notice periods. So the user has to do research on his contract and if he gets the lifetime/notice periods wrong his cancellation will fail. Information (unfortunately only in german): https://www.voelker-gruppe.com/stuttgart/kuendigungsschaltflaeche/ https://www.voelker-gruppe.com/stuttgart/kuendigungsschaltfl...

Osiris 5y ago
And this is why regulating companies is hard. It's difficult to word things in a way that's generic enough to cover many businesses while at the same time not leaving big loopholes.
- amyjess 5y ago
  See, I'd approach it a different way. Don't even give them the option of building their own UI. Require all companies who provide any kind of subscription service to implement specific API hooks that interact with a government portal. Specify the API endpoints, their expected payloads, and the resultant behaviors in excruciating detail (use formal methods if needed) and require that they send the API tokens to a specific secure endpoint controlled by the government. And the standard way of cancelling your service will be to log into the government portal, browse the list of subscription services you're subscribed to until you find what you're looking to cancel, click the checkbox next to it, and click 'Unsubscribe'. And the government portal will send an authenticated request to the company's legally-mandated cancel API and the cancel request, by law, must immediately result in automated total purging of the user's account with the company within 10 seconds of receiving the request.

deleted 5y ago

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daenz 5y ago

Related, yesterday I tried to cancel my Kindle Unlimited trial. I found the page easily enough, but when I clicked cancel, I received an "400 Oops!" page. Then attempting to visit the original page at all resulted in "400 Oops!" I waited for some time to pass and was still unable to cancel. I nearly forgot about it, but a few hours later, I tried again and it succeeded. Now, I know it's slightly paranoid to assume that it wasn't just a bug preventing me from canceling, but at the scale Amazon operates at, and the SLAs they shoot for, what are the odds that it would occur at the moment I try to cancel? To the conspiracy theorist side of me, it felt like a dark pattern. In my mind, the lengths that Amazon would go to to prevent Prime cancellations adds more suspicion about my Kindle Unlimited cancellation experience.

wccrawford 5y ago
I recently canceled my Kindle Unlimited subscription as well, and experienced no issues other than the "dark patterns" already outlined in other posts here. I know it's a massive coincidence that that happened to you, but I really do think it was just a coincidence. If it happened too often, people would be screaming about it on social media in no time.

MarkSweep 5y ago

There should be a rule that the percentage of people who successfully cancel and the time it takes them to do so has to be the same or better than the signup process.

lotsofpulp 5y ago

Amazon introduced a dark pattern to try to get you to accept your refund in the form of Amazon store credit rather than back to your original payment method. On my iOS device, going to Amazon.com in safari, I initiated the return, and then the question of how I want to process the return came up, and the top 3 or 4 options all resulted in me not getting my money back. The option to refund to original payment method was all the way at the bottom (had to scroll), and in a different color/formatting such that it took me effort to recognize it as an option. My parents and their ilk would have no chance against this kind of nonsense.

buzzdenver 5y ago

I happened to cancel my Prime earlier this morning. They do make you click through a few pages. They validated my decision by showing how many free prime orders I had, and it'd come out to a wash even if I paid to expedite all of them. Most of the time I would be fine waiting a few days. As a bright spot they had the option to keep enjoying Prime benefits until my membership actually expires. It really pisses me off when companies only have the option to "cancel right now" and forego the membership that you already paid for.

philliphaydon 5y ago

This is why I don’t want apple to support other payment processors on iOS. I signed up on my phone and so cancelling is easy. The moment the payments are done by a 3rd party this will be difficult again.

registeredcorn 5y ago

Wow. Who would have thought that a company known for treating employees horribly would also treat customers horribly?

prytania 5y ago

File this under ‘not a story’. Every subscription service ever tries to convince you to stay before cancellation. At least you don’t have to ‘email support’ or call as I’ve had to do in the past. The meal delivery services are the worst of the worst when it comes to this

SubiculumCode 5y ago

I canceled prime, but they make it super easy to accidentally resign up for it when ordering.

testplzignore 5y ago

Are there services that are easier to cancel than Prime? I don't use many online suscription services, so I don't know. Of the services I have used, Twitch is the easiest. Prime takes more clicks, but its just a few extra seconds. Maybe I find it easy because I've canceled so many free trials. A dark pattern I really hate is when you have to use the desktop version of a website to change certain settings or cancel.

AlexandrB 5y ago
Anything using Apple's subscription management is easier. It's one reason why many rush to defend Apple's restrictive App Store policies whenever the subject comes up.
- mardifoufs 5y ago
  Yeah same for android. I get that fees are high and the play store has it's issues... BuI still always try to subscribe through the store just to avoid the trouble of having to track down subscriptions. The price is also much more transparent, so there's no bait and switch between annual/monthly prices. The ideal would be to have a a website like privacy.com here in Canada but there's no service or even bank that allows you to have disposable credit cards. I wonder if it's due to regulatory differences
chihuahua 5y ago
Netflix and Zwift are easy to cancel.

ccn0p 5y ago

is this even surprising? anyone else notice how when returning something for a refund, the refund option to actually return your money is a hard-to-see link unlike the other options? it might even be a little javascript click away if I recall. the perfect example of interfacing your cash into their pockets.

jquast 5y ago

Pretty certain I was a part of their experiment, not Prime related, I just wished to close my account entirely. They kept replying that "someone will contact you in 24-48 hours", but nobody would. I got more aggressive each cycle, waiting 3 days, 2 days, then 1 day, the process was cyclical, I could not close the account. When I changed my name to "FUCK AMAZON" my request was immediately processed, prior comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23720203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23720203

lfkdev 5y ago

surprise?

edmcnulty101 5y ago

I use Privacy.com to help with this kind of dark pattern B.S.

nvr219 5y ago

I don't know about canceling Prime, but I did delete my account a couple of years ago and I remember that process being much easier than I expected. Didn't have to call anyone, for example (like some other companies).

seandoe 5y ago

In other news, water is wet.

patwolf 5y ago

I suspect Amazon uses a lot of dark patterns. Multiple times I've discovered that I'm subscribed to some Amazon digital subscription that I had no idea about. I do read my credit card statements every month, but there are enough Amazon purchases on there that I don't notice a small monthly subscription charge. When I've tried to cancel them, it takes me through a confusing series of dialogs that I have to read very carefully to make sure I'm doing the correct thing.

zitterbewegung 5y ago

How was this secret unless your haven’t tried to cancel your prime membership ? Or was that dark pattern shown to people at random?

ineedasername 5y ago

Amazon has a bad history in dealing with ToS for Prime in general. In the beginning Prime was about free 2-day shipping and $3.99 next-day shipping, and was written into the ToS. Then one time I wanted to ship something next-day and the charge was going to be $8.99. I was curious about when it had changed, and what the rules were: but the current ToS didn't specify a particular price, and I couldn't find any notification from Amazon about the change, so I went digging in Wayback. To cut things short, at some point Amazon changed the ToS, removing the requirement that they notify customers of future changes, while the $3.99 price remained the same. Then, at some point in the future, Amazon removed the $3.99 guarantee but was no longer required to notify customers that they'd now be paying more for that service. Very sneaky.

jeppester 5y ago

Hopefully it will turn out to be a very shortsighted strategy. I for one am not going to sign up again. Still, there should be a rule that cancelling must be at least as easy as signing up.

foolproofplan 5y ago

I asked to cancel my subscription once in a chat and they just flat out ignored my request although they said they would. I'm sure amazon has all sorts of scummy ways.

acdanger 5y ago

I worked for a big bank building out the software the call center agents used to service customers. One of the changes that was requested from on high was to make the UI around free shipping for replacement bank cards intentionally painful for the agent to use. The hope was that the agents wouldn't mention the free shipping option or talk the customer out of it since it added some annoyances for the agent.

dopa42365 5y ago

Recently canceled my Prime (nothing wrong with it, but I don't buy enough stuff to actually save money on shipping etc), it took like 20 seconds and 5 clicks, whatever. Hate the game, not the players.

mzvkxlcvd 5y ago

I have a different interesting "problem". I have prime and I don't know why. No one is paying for it, but i get prime shipping on everything. If i try to look at my prime settings i have the option to sign up for prime. not complaining though.

icedistilled 5y ago

I did a prime trial and then cancelled it... only to get a bill a bit later for prime. My account showed cancelled, I did not have active prime. I had to call in and the phone help explained that the auto bill option was checked... Nowhere on my side of the UI was an auto bill option shown and in what bizarro logic would auto bill stay active after cancelling?

sydthrowaway 5y ago

Amazon and Dropbox need to be sanctioned for this dark pattern shit

awinter-py 5y ago

one future here is for gov to mandate 'dark pattern-prone' biz processes to be handled by open APIs or third parties like email client's 'unsubscribe' button but for everything designing this feature would be a natural fit for apple if they were actually pro consumer rights, rather than trying to destroy, then become, facebook

ozzythecat 5y ago

Anyone whose worked at amazon isn’t going to be surprised by this. Much of Amazon’s retail/consumer organization is heavily product management driven. PMs are under pressure and incentivized to release features or somehow show impact that translates into some bottom line metric. If you can show your work attributed X% decrease in cancellations or Y% increase in bottom line profit, especially with a small engineering team, that’s your fastest path to promotion. This leads to a culture of churning out “features”, often at the expense of the end product or the expense of customers. I guarantee you there were a/b test results that were summarized and twisted around in a document, presenting the test results as a net win for customers. And there are second and third order effects - constant tweaks and duct tape on top of monolithic systems that prevent Amazon from being innovative. The company makes shockingly little investment in this area, and when you couple that with engineers constantly churning, it becomes clear that product teams deliver some dark pattern or other unhelpful feature because the poorly strung together architecture limits any real innovation. The engineers may have their own opinions, but at the end of the day nobody gives a shit about what they think except on design and scale concerns. What’s the operational/support cost of X? If we promise Y to our leadership, can we deliver it by this date? Most of the recent hiring when I left, especially for engineers, were study abroad students from China or India. They wouldn’t say anything being afraid not to rock the boat, especially because of their work situation. If a manager puts them on a development plan, they will most likely get fired and have to leave the US. The company has found this structure so advantageous to its business that if not for Indian and Chinese talent, in my opinion, Amazon in its current cultural state would implode.

deanCommie 5y ago
> PMs are under pressure and incentivized to release features or somehow show impact that translates into some bottom line metric. So are PMs at all companies?

Animats 5y ago

Just buying from Amazon without using Prime requires getting past three dark patterns. "No, I don't want free delivery" is one of them. Amazon still offers "free delivery" without Prime, but the web site gives you a date further in the future. In practice, they usually deliver faster than that. There are dark patterns to keep you away from that option, but it works fine. I don't have Prime and haven't paid for Amazon delivery in a long time.

skydhash 5y ago
I guess they use farther warehouses when doing free delivery without prime. I bought a keyboard on Wednesday and they said Monday. On Thursday, it was still being processed, so I just paid the next-day delivery ($10), and the progress rewinds back to the beginning, so I think they switched warehouses.

giords 5y ago

NordVPN is pretty hard to cancel as well

deanCommie 5y ago

Here's a more charitable interpretation to consider that's not "Mwahaha let's make it impossible for people to cancel Prime so we can make more money": "We have worked hard to make Prime a good deal for customers. But we also know that a lot of customers don't know about the benefits. They just know that if they sign up for Prime they can get free shipping. So they do so and then they cancel. Are we sure that customers know about all the benefits that they get from Prime before they cancel? Maybe if they did, they would not be so hasty. Do they know about Music and Photos and Video? Maybe if they did, they'd keep it around. Let's show them the options during the cancellation flow to make sure they REALLY know what they're giving up. And let's flip around the yes/no buttons to make sure they actually read it - similar to what security confirmation messages do when you're about to do something irreversible."

DarkContinent 5y ago

Is Amazon even the hardest place to cancel your membership? Udacity for instance required me to talk to a person to cancel a $400/month subscription.

dorgo 5y ago

I subscribe/unsubscribe every other month. Depends on whether there is something interesting on prime or netflix. From time to time I get a free month or a week for 1€. Just canceled my free month. Rule of thumb is to never click the button you would click when drunk. They changed something. I had to allow amazon.dev in ublock origin.

azalemeth 5y ago

I've never really understood the value proposition of Prime. Spend a lot more money monthly so that you can... Spend more money with free shipping attached, and get some (variable quality) videos thrown in for free?

mft_ 5y ago
It’s genius, in a slightly dark manner. I/we bought a new house a couple of years ago and have obviously needed lots of different stuff, large and small, as a result. Our choice of local shops is relatively restricted and I’d estimate that >90% of everything bought online (by volume) has been from Amazon - it’s fast, free, and reliable. That Prime subscription pays for itself several times over in postage costs saved, before you consider any of the other relative perks it brings. It’s an enabler - and means that Amazon is your first choice to look for something you need, before any other site. If you want to look at it purely mathematically, I find that typical postage from an independent online retailer costs ~€4 for something by small. So if I purchase more than 2-3 items per month, the cost of Prime is already earned back.

hacknews20 5y ago

It’s a devious click and switch game. It’s tricked and continues to trick many a person, not least the old and vulnerable. It’s a form of evil cynicism.