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As someone who managed to successfully cancel Prime, and then tried to purchase an item on amazon.com, it took me over a minute to figure out how to not acciden

As someone who managed to successfully cancel Prime, and then tried to purchase an item on amazon.com, it took me over a minute to figure out how to not accidentally sign up for Prime membership when trying to checkout. There was only one place I could click that would allow me to advance to the next screen (simple text), the text was super small placed below a giant image, and my cursor didn't change to indicate that it was clickable, e.g., https://imgur.com/a/VNlU9L9 https://imgur.com/a/VNlU9L9. Additionally, I received my package in the same amount of time as Prime said it would take. Which leaves the question, what is the benefit of Prime membership? It's not free shipping, it's not free grocery delivery, it's not Music or Video, it's not discount prices on Amazon retail website, and it is most certainly not any assurance of authentic goods. Prime is snake oil. After enduring the 10+ page questionnaire on why I was cancelling Prime, the only way to cancel my Prime membership, it is clear no one took the answers to the questions seriously. This lawsuit is long overdue.

gmd63 3y ago
That is horrible UX. I feel for the designers that are bossed around by the short sighted people who rationalize manipulating customers at Amazon and hope they have the courage and means to move to a better workplace where they can build something with positive-sum value.
- scrum-treats 3y ago
  Agree. It is negligent and unqualified management at the root of this. Talented employees who know better and try to do better are dealt dirty hands; forced to either commit illegal acts like this or face intense psychological abuse, the PIP train, and ultimately termination. Sometimes they realize what is happening and they quit. Either way, Amazon facilitates and even encourages this behavior, as people receive raises for this stuff. I hope employees can experience federal protection against this. We definitely need it.
  - watwut 3y ago
    >Talented employees who know better and try to do better ... typically leave these companies. I know multiple people who made such choices, leaving company that asked for something unethical. If we were talking about low paid employees with no options, the "they are forced to" would be reasonable argument. But in here these people have choices and are just unwilling to take slightly less paid job.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
  I don't feel for the designers. Whenever I see horrible UX from big tech it creeps into my mind that the people making it are some of the highest paid in the world and these companies are some of the richest in the world. It's either intentional or we are all suckers.
  - jjgreen 3y ago
    We should all be able to "git blame" those dark patterns
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    I agree. There's no reason to feel bad for such employees. They've chosen to work where they work, and I assume that they're happy with that choice.
    - autoexec 3y ago
      I've heard that Amazon is a horrible place to work. Execs crying at their desks, and delivery drivers and warehouse workers being forced to piss in bottles or wear diapers in order to keep their jobs. I don't imagine that coders have it that much better. Layoffs at amazon are in the news all the time. There have been reports of 150% annual turnover with the average employee leaving shortly after 6 months. Employees have said they use stack ranking and cull many of those who do stay. I expect a lot of amazon employees are very far from happy with where they are. Some probably have skills that can get them better jobs, but I'll bet it's harder for the guys doing front end web design who are ordered to implement dark patterns in an effort to trick amazon users into signing up for things they don't want.
      - JohnFen 3y ago
        By "happy", I mean that they're choosing to continue working where they work. They're getting a benefit from it. Otherwise, they would make a different choice. If they continue to work at a place that makes them miserable for whatever reason (fear of loss of income, status, change, whatever), then I do have sympathy for their emotional problem. But in the end, they can choose to have a different situation.
rerx 3y ago
I typically sign up for Prime for a month or two when I book vacation stays on booking.com. They have a very nice promotion where prime members receive 10% in credit. Then I watch a couple of films or shows on Prime Video, because they actually have some good stuff there usually. But free shipping below 39€ is really not worth the subscription to me (Germany).
- LunaSea 3y ago
  This deal is apparently only available to German and Austrian users. Nice tip though!
kyrra 3y ago
My family dropped Amazon prime a few months ago, the checkout process on Amazon without prime has been getting worse the last few months. They try so hard to trick you into buying prime, I have to be very careful to make sure I don't accidentally do it. They also keep changing the flow every few weeks, so I have to pay close attention every time.
- bombcar 3y ago
  I’ve found a really easy way to avoid it is use Walmart.com heheh
  - Sherl 3y ago
    Walmart app does a similar dark pattern IMHO. It would pop up asking for Walmart+ as soon as it launches. I have been a victim of accidentl trial sign-up with Walmart+ The opt in button would be at the bottom where exactly "account" sits.
patentatt 3y ago
Same here, cancelled prime and still receive packages in 1-2 days generally. I never really used any other of the services under prime like video or music, so I don't miss it one bit. Also shifted most of my online purchasing to target anyways, I find the products and experience to be far superior, and I have a local store to go to also. I spent my prime budget on a shipt subscription and get target items delivered in a couple hours.
- everybodyknows 3y ago
  For computer stuff, I switched to Staples, to be inspected at local store before acceptance. No more scratched monitors from Amazon Prime sold as "new".
Beldin 3y ago
> it's not Music or Video Weird. Around here, Prime does give access to video. I know folks around here who have prime just for that. I doublechecked just to be sure; it still is like that (according to a quick google search).
- scrum-treats 3y ago
  Video streaming is broken. 4K is a lie, UI and UX is clumsy and uninviting at best. There's predatory sign-ups for supplemental packages that customers have no idea about until they've been charged (sometimes for more than a year). Customer Service then tries to only refund for 1-6 months, unless the customer hires a lawyer. TV and Movie Titles that were available for free one week suddenly disappear (without warning) or require payment for continued availability (e.g., TV series), even though you pay for Prime and it was free for Prime last week. For Amazon Music, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36372298 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36372298. I could go on... When you start looking at all these patterns, across all these services (e.g., Prime, Alexa, Music, Video), it's clear that one type of team must be dictating all of this (e.g., Music and Video). It's all predatory, in the same style; homogenous. Talk about placing a bet on the wrong horse.
  - vladvasiliu 3y ago
    Maybe it's not the same in all regions (I'm in France), plus sample size of one and whatnot, but I actually enjoy Prime Video. I don't watch many movies / series, so its being cheap matters a lot to me. It has enough shows to keep me busy. There's a visible toggle to only show content that's "free for me", so I don't end up accidentally clicking on something that's not included. Plus, everything that's not free for prime members has a big icon attached to it, and it'll actually ask clearly if I want to pay to view it. The UI is OK, I can easily find my way around it. I haven't used Netflix much, but it was much more of a pain to navigate, even for shows that I was already watching and wanted to get back to. For shows disappearing, I've always seen a text saying they'd be leaving prime in X days. I haven't tried Amazon Music, but I did buy a Fire TV stick, and I love that, too. I have a dumb PC monitor with terrible sound and the stick is the only player I've had that managed to only output the sound in stereo, so I can hook it up digitally to my stereo amplifier (through an HDMI toslink extractor I've got off Amazon for cheap). It's also able to tweak the remote signals so that it controls my amp volume instead of its integrated volume control. I've seen shows that pretend to be in 4K (my monitor is 4k). They look pretty good, but I don't know how to be certain they're actually 4k.
crazygringo 3y ago
Wow, that image is terrible. I usually consider myself pretty good against dark patterns but it took me forever to find what to click to not sign up. Once I realized both the gray areas aren't what you click, I couldn't see any other options. That seems like what I expect a crappy deceptive startup to implement in order to try to boost metrics for the next round of investment. It's not the kind of shady UX I associate with the largest tech companies. I seriously would not have expected that from Amazon, so I'm very happy the FTC is stepping in here. Not to mention that this is very much against Amazon's supposed values, including "customer obsession" [1] -- to "work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust" [2]. This is very much the opposite of that, when customers discover they've been deceived into signing up. [1] https://www.aboutamazon.com/about-us https://www.aboutamazon.com/about-us [2] https://www.aboutamazon.com/about-us/leadership-principles https://www.aboutamazon.com/about-us/leadership-principles
bluepod4 3y ago
> It's not free shipping, it's not free grocery delivery, it's not Music or Video, it's not discount prices on Amazon retail website, and it is most certainly not any assurance of authentic goods. FWIW, I use it for Prime Video, Prime First Reads ((where you can choose from 1-2 free books per month)) and Prime Reading. A long time ago, I did use it for faster delivery. There was definitely a difference. But the items I tend to order now are usually heavily stocked and are delivered quickly anyway. I wonder if people who live in rural areas are still benefitting from faster Prime delivery. (Also, no offense, but I canceled my annual Prime subscription when they upped the price and then restarted a monthly plan later when I decided I did want to keep the other benefits. It wasn’t as difficult as you’re making it seem to cancel. And it didn’t seem any different than when I cancel other services where they try to get you to stay.) (Also, I’m not sure if you were aware, but technically you can split the cost with multiple people (i.e. friends or relatives) if you set up an Amazon Household account) (Also, interestingly, it looks like you can ((in certain countries I think)) just subscribe to Prime Video instead of the whole service. I guess Kindle Unlimited can be considered a separate ((and slightly better)) service for Prime Reading. Hmmmmmmm, maybe I will cancel the whole service.)
- ydant 3y ago
  > (Also, I’m not sure if you were aware, but technically you can split the cost with multiple people (i.e. friends or relatives) if you set up an Amazon Household account) It's just two adults now (and a limited "teen" program which doesn't acknowledge the realities of kids living at home past 17). I have four adults on my account, but two of them are grandfathered in and still receive my "prime benefits", but aren't shown anywhere in my Amazon account that I can find. https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=GXULX24SE2RD7EXS https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
mey 3y ago
Twitch without Ads was a nice benefit until that got removed years ago. We have gotten rid of our Prime membership as well. The death of it was really the 3rd party sellers and fighting to find the correct item.
willio58 3y ago
Jaw dropped looking at that. Absolutely disgusting business practice. Glad the FTC is stepping in.
chang1 3y ago
Funny, I just encountered the same experience. I cancelled Prime after 12 continuous years of subscribing. I placed my first Amazon order a few days ago sans-Prime and was amazed at the blatant dark patterns put in place to get me to sign up again. When I finally got to the checkout page, I had to manually change the shipping for each item from $5.99 standard shipping to free shipping (because I hit the $25 threshold). A few hours later, I get a solicitation for Amazon Music (not sure if I would have gotten this if I was a Prime subscriber). Then the next day I got an email saying "Your package is arriving earlier than we previously expected"... the same as Prime 2-day shipping. Maybe it's logistically easier to just ship 2-day instead of holding on to inventory? I thought cancelling Prime would have been difficult (especially with Prime only discounts at Whole Foods), but finding alternatives to Amazon and Whole Foods has been easy. I guess it's no wonder Amazon tries to push it so hard because it's relatively easy to live without.
- scrum-treats 3y ago
  > "When I finally got to the checkout page, I had to manually change the shipping for each item from $5.99 standard shipping to free shipping (because I hit the $25 threshold)." Exactly this: https://imgur.com/a/Xi4ZO3i https://imgur.com/a/Xi4ZO3i. Notice how I am being told that I'm "saving $5.99 if I enroll in Prime", and the default selection is the $5.99 delivery option, however I qualify for free shipping. Further, this free shipping option changes location between purchases, making it even more confusing for customers to not be unnecessarily overcharged.
sircastor 3y ago
I’ve been wondering about this. My wife and I recently did some budgeting and I started to wonder if we really needed a prime subscription. Early on free 2-day shipping was really great, and worked reliably. Nowadays is hit or miss how fast you get something. And I think I can figure out how to spend my $140 better.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
  I see 2-day shipping as a stupid twilight zone between urgently needing something (which I'd go to the store for) or being able to wait. If it can wait two days then it can wait a week IMO.
dhdhhdd 3y ago
Prime video, unlimited photo backup and ad free music, but limited selection. 2% extra cash back (on Amazon credit card) (so 5% in total). Not sure if there is anything else, but it can be worthwhile. The unlimited photo backup, including raw, is worthwhile for me (5tb or so)
- scrum-treats 3y ago
  You do realize Amazon has access to your photos, right?

gmd63 3y ago

That is horrible UX. I feel for the designers that are bossed around by the short sighted people who rationalize manipulating customers at Amazon and hope they have the courage and means to move to a better workplace where they can build something with positive-sum value.

scrum-treats 3y ago
Agree. It is negligent and unqualified management at the root of this. Talented employees who know better and try to do better are dealt dirty hands; forced to either commit illegal acts like this or face intense psychological abuse, the PIP train, and ultimately termination. Sometimes they realize what is happening and they quit. Either way, Amazon facilitates and even encourages this behavior, as people receive raises for this stuff. I hope employees can experience federal protection against this. We definitely need it.
- watwut 3y ago
  >Talented employees who know better and try to do better ... typically leave these companies. I know multiple people who made such choices, leaving company that asked for something unethical. If we were talking about low paid employees with no options, the "they are forced to" would be reasonable argument. But in here these people have choices and are just unwilling to take slightly less paid job.
2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
I don't feel for the designers. Whenever I see horrible UX from big tech it creeps into my mind that the people making it are some of the highest paid in the world and these companies are some of the richest in the world. It's either intentional or we are all suckers.
- jjgreen 3y ago
  We should all be able to "git blame" those dark patterns
- JohnFen 3y ago
  I agree. There's no reason to feel bad for such employees. They've chosen to work where they work, and I assume that they're happy with that choice.
  - autoexec 3y ago
    I've heard that Amazon is a horrible place to work. Execs crying at their desks, and delivery drivers and warehouse workers being forced to piss in bottles or wear diapers in order to keep their jobs. I don't imagine that coders have it that much better. Layoffs at amazon are in the news all the time. There have been reports of 150% annual turnover with the average employee leaving shortly after 6 months. Employees have said they use stack ranking and cull many of those who do stay. I expect a lot of amazon employees are very far from happy with where they are. Some probably have skills that can get them better jobs, but I'll bet it's harder for the guys doing front end web design who are ordered to implement dark patterns in an effort to trick amazon users into signing up for things they don't want.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      By "happy", I mean that they're choosing to continue working where they work. They're getting a benefit from it. Otherwise, they would make a different choice. If they continue to work at a place that makes them miserable for whatever reason (fear of loss of income, status, change, whatever), then I do have sympathy for their emotional problem. But in the end, they can choose to have a different situation.

rerx 3y ago

I typically sign up for Prime for a month or two when I book vacation stays on booking.com. They have a very nice promotion where prime members receive 10% in credit. Then I watch a couple of films or shows on Prime Video, because they actually have some good stuff there usually. But free shipping below 39€ is really not worth the subscription to me (Germany).

LunaSea 3y ago
This deal is apparently only available to German and Austrian users. Nice tip though!

kyrra 3y ago

My family dropped Amazon prime a few months ago, the checkout process on Amazon without prime has been getting worse the last few months. They try so hard to trick you into buying prime, I have to be very careful to make sure I don't accidentally do it. They also keep changing the flow every few weeks, so I have to pay close attention every time.

bombcar 3y ago
I’ve found a really easy way to avoid it is use Walmart.com heheh
- Sherl 3y ago
  Walmart app does a similar dark pattern IMHO. It would pop up asking for Walmart+ as soon as it launches. I have been a victim of accidentl trial sign-up with Walmart+ The opt in button would be at the bottom where exactly "account" sits.

patentatt 3y ago

Same here, cancelled prime and still receive packages in 1-2 days generally. I never really used any other of the services under prime like video or music, so I don't miss it one bit. Also shifted most of my online purchasing to target anyways, I find the products and experience to be far superior, and I have a local store to go to also. I spent my prime budget on a shipt subscription and get target items delivered in a couple hours.

everybodyknows 3y ago
For computer stuff, I switched to Staples, to be inspected at local store before acceptance. No more scratched monitors from Amazon Prime sold as "new".

Beldin 3y ago

> it's not Music or Video Weird. Around here, Prime does give access to video. I know folks around here who have prime just for that. I doublechecked just to be sure; it still is like that (according to a quick google search).

scrum-treats 3y ago
Video streaming is broken. 4K is a lie, UI and UX is clumsy and uninviting at best. There's predatory sign-ups for supplemental packages that customers have no idea about until they've been charged (sometimes for more than a year). Customer Service then tries to only refund for 1-6 months, unless the customer hires a lawyer. TV and Movie Titles that were available for free one week suddenly disappear (without warning) or require payment for continued availability (e.g., TV series), even though you pay for Prime and it was free for Prime last week. For Amazon Music, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36372298 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36372298. I could go on... When you start looking at all these patterns, across all these services (e.g., Prime, Alexa, Music, Video), it's clear that one type of team must be dictating all of this (e.g., Music and Video). It's all predatory, in the same style; homogenous. Talk about placing a bet on the wrong horse.
- vladvasiliu 3y ago
  Maybe it's not the same in all regions (I'm in France), plus sample size of one and whatnot, but I actually enjoy Prime Video. I don't watch many movies / series, so its being cheap matters a lot to me. It has enough shows to keep me busy. There's a visible toggle to only show content that's "free for me", so I don't end up accidentally clicking on something that's not included. Plus, everything that's not free for prime members has a big icon attached to it, and it'll actually ask clearly if I want to pay to view it. The UI is OK, I can easily find my way around it. I haven't used Netflix much, but it was much more of a pain to navigate, even for shows that I was already watching and wanted to get back to. For shows disappearing, I've always seen a text saying they'd be leaving prime in X days. I haven't tried Amazon Music, but I did buy a Fire TV stick, and I love that, too. I have a dumb PC monitor with terrible sound and the stick is the only player I've had that managed to only output the sound in stereo, so I can hook it up digitally to my stereo amplifier (through an HDMI toslink extractor I've got off Amazon for cheap). It's also able to tweak the remote signals so that it controls my amp volume instead of its integrated volume control. I've seen shows that pretend to be in 4K (my monitor is 4k). They look pretty good, but I don't know how to be certain they're actually 4k.

crazygringo 3y ago

Wow, that image is terrible. I usually consider myself pretty good against dark patterns but it took me forever to find what to click to not sign up. Once I realized both the gray areas aren't what you click, I couldn't see any other options. That seems like what I expect a crappy deceptive startup to implement in order to try to boost metrics for the next round of investment. It's not the kind of shady UX I associate with the largest tech companies. I seriously would not have expected that from Amazon, so I'm very happy the FTC is stepping in here. Not to mention that this is very much against Amazon's supposed values, including "customer obsession" [1] -- to "work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust" [2]. This is very much the opposite of that, when customers discover they've been deceived into signing up. [1] https://www.aboutamazon.com/about-us https://www.aboutamazon.com/about-us [2] https://www.aboutamazon.com/about-us/leadership-principles https://www.aboutamazon.com/about-us/leadership-principles

bluepod4 3y ago

> It's not free shipping, it's not free grocery delivery, it's not Music or Video, it's not discount prices on Amazon retail website, and it is most certainly not any assurance of authentic goods. FWIW, I use it for Prime Video, Prime First Reads ((where you can choose from 1-2 free books per month)) and Prime Reading. A long time ago, I did use it for faster delivery. There was definitely a difference. But the items I tend to order now are usually heavily stocked and are delivered quickly anyway. I wonder if people who live in rural areas are still benefitting from faster Prime delivery. (Also, no offense, but I canceled my annual Prime subscription when they upped the price and then restarted a monthly plan later when I decided I did want to keep the other benefits. It wasn’t as difficult as you’re making it seem to cancel. And it didn’t seem any different than when I cancel other services where they try to get you to stay.) (Also, I’m not sure if you were aware, but technically you can split the cost with multiple people (i.e. friends or relatives) if you set up an Amazon Household account) (Also, interestingly, it looks like you can ((in certain countries I think)) just subscribe to Prime Video instead of the whole service. I guess Kindle Unlimited can be considered a separate ((and slightly better)) service for Prime Reading. Hmmmmmmm, maybe I will cancel the whole service.)

ydant 3y ago
> (Also, I’m not sure if you were aware, but technically you can split the cost with multiple people (i.e. friends or relatives) if you set up an Amazon Household account) It's just two adults now (and a limited "teen" program which doesn't acknowledge the realities of kids living at home past 17). I have four adults on my account, but two of them are grandfathered in and still receive my "prime benefits", but aren't shown anywhere in my Amazon account that I can find. https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=GXULX24SE2RD7EXS https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...

mey 3y ago

Twitch without Ads was a nice benefit until that got removed years ago. We have gotten rid of our Prime membership as well. The death of it was really the 3rd party sellers and fighting to find the correct item.

willio58 3y ago

Jaw dropped looking at that. Absolutely disgusting business practice. Glad the FTC is stepping in.

chang1 3y ago

Funny, I just encountered the same experience. I cancelled Prime after 12 continuous years of subscribing. I placed my first Amazon order a few days ago sans-Prime and was amazed at the blatant dark patterns put in place to get me to sign up again. When I finally got to the checkout page, I had to manually change the shipping for each item from $5.99 standard shipping to free shipping (because I hit the $25 threshold). A few hours later, I get a solicitation for Amazon Music (not sure if I would have gotten this if I was a Prime subscriber). Then the next day I got an email saying "Your package is arriving earlier than we previously expected"... the same as Prime 2-day shipping. Maybe it's logistically easier to just ship 2-day instead of holding on to inventory? I thought cancelling Prime would have been difficult (especially with Prime only discounts at Whole Foods), but finding alternatives to Amazon and Whole Foods has been easy. I guess it's no wonder Amazon tries to push it so hard because it's relatively easy to live without.

scrum-treats 3y ago
> "When I finally got to the checkout page, I had to manually change the shipping for each item from $5.99 standard shipping to free shipping (because I hit the $25 threshold)." Exactly this: https://imgur.com/a/Xi4ZO3i https://imgur.com/a/Xi4ZO3i. Notice how I am being told that I'm "saving $5.99 if I enroll in Prime", and the default selection is the $5.99 delivery option, however I qualify for free shipping. Further, this free shipping option changes location between purchases, making it even more confusing for customers to not be unnecessarily overcharged.

sircastor 3y ago

I’ve been wondering about this. My wife and I recently did some budgeting and I started to wonder if we really needed a prime subscription. Early on free 2-day shipping was really great, and worked reliably. Nowadays is hit or miss how fast you get something. And I think I can figure out how to spend my $140 better.

2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
I see 2-day shipping as a stupid twilight zone between urgently needing something (which I'd go to the store for) or being able to wait. If it can wait two days then it can wait a week IMO.

dhdhhdd 3y ago

Prime video, unlimited photo backup and ad free music, but limited selection. 2% extra cash back (on Amazon credit card) (so 5% in total). Not sure if there is anything else, but it can be worthwhile. The unlimited photo backup, including raw, is worthwhile for me (5tb or so)

scrum-treats 3y ago
You do realize Amazon has access to your photos, right?