Yesterday I mentioned that government bureaucracies were no worse—and probably better than—corporate bureaucracies, which are "frequently set up explicitly to help customers as little as possible without losing them." Today, by chance, we get a perfect example of this: Amazon Prime, whose parent is being sued by the FTC for making it just a little too easy to sign up for Prime and all but impossible to cancel. Sara Morrison at Vox has the deets:
The FTC points out that Amazon places multiple points along the way of a customer’s purchasing journey where they’re urged to sign up for Prime, including “interrupting” their shopping with “prominent” buttons offering Prime enrollments and tiny links declining them. The customer must select one in order to continue their purchase. The suit claims that Prime subscription offers aren’t always clearly worded as such, and consumers may think they’re simply choosing to get free shipping or a free trial without realizing that a paid subscription comes along with it.
And then there’s the Homeric journey one must take to cancel their Prime subscription. Seriously: Amazon even called it the “Iliad Flow” in internal documents uncovered last year by Insider. There, customers had to get through a four-page, six-click, 15-option process to cancel their subscriptions on desktop and an eight-page, eight-click minimum process on mobile. Getting to the Iliad Flow in the first place is its own odyssey, as the FTC describes:
To cancel via the Iliad Flow, a consumer had to first locate it, which Amazon made difficult. Consumers could access the Iliad Flow from Amazon.com by navigating to the Prime Central page, which consumers could reach by selecting the “Account & Lists” dropdown menu, reviewing the third column of dropdown links Amazon presented, and selecting the eleventh option in the third column (“Prime Membership”). This took the consumer to the Prime Central Page.
And then ...
Once the consumer reached Prime Central, the consumer had to click on the “Manage Membership” button to access the dropdown menu. That revealed three options. The first two were “Share your benefits” (to add household members to Prime) and “Remind me before renewing” (Amazon then sent the consumer an email reminder before the next charge). The last option was “End Membership.” The “End Membership” button did not end membership. Rather, it took the consumer to the Iliad Flow.
According to the Wall Street Journal, 72% of all American households subscribe to Prime. I wonder how many of them actually want to subscribe to Prime?
Of course, there are also companies that make it hard to buy stuff in the first place. For the past two days I've been trying to buy a gift subscription to Tatler but . . . I can't. I enter all my address information and supply a credit card and Condé Nast seems happy with everything. Then I push the "Confirm Purchase" button and an icon starts spinning. And spinning. And spinning some more. An hour later it's still spinning and nothing has happened. I guess they don't want my business very much after all. Before long I may even be forced into using the telephone.
At the risk of channeling P. T. Barnum, I cannot say that I’ve found it difficult to cancel Prime, but then it has always been obvious to me that the entreaties to sign up for it were clearly something I didn’t want.
Ie, so I’ve never had to…
How to cancel Prime: Don't update your credit card info.
Yep, easiest way to cancel any recurring subscription.
I love virtual credit card numbers. You can set the expiration date and close the number at any time.
More than once I've had to ditch a credit card and report it lost in order to ensure that I would not be retroactively charged for something like a subscription renewal.
I've definitely had to cancel a Prime Trial for my mum at least once. Was quite the journey. 🙂
I cancelled prime last year.
The main reason is that their delivery sucks for me; I live in a very urban environment, and all too frequently, they would just leave stuff on the sidewalk. I have a video highlight reel of it from my cameras. Once was comical - they dropped the box, took a picture and walked off. Literally a couple seconds later someone comes behind him, scoops it up and walks off in the same direction.
Since the process was,
- order from Amazon,
- Amazon delivery gifts someone random my package,
- file for refund,
- go buy whatever it was somewhere else.
I decided to start skipping the first three steps.
Main problem is, that works fairly poorly for many books. I still buy paper ones, and can get a lot of things elsewhere, some things are hard, so recently I tried to order one from Amazon.
And they put Prime in the fucking shopping cart, *after* a forced interstitial with a tiny gray "no" button. And it is a "special" shopping cart item, you have to read around the page to figure out how to get rid of it.
I noped out of the order and fired an angry email at the void that they call customer service. And I'm done with them, until I forget how awful they are again.
I find the 72% of households have prime stat dubious, 72% of American households pay $130 a year?
Depends on how that’s counted doesn’t it? I have Prime and my two adult children who have their own homes use it. How is that counted?
Haven't cancelled, but I've thought about it. How often I need 2 day delivery? I'd probably buy less without it. It is nice, however, when I just want something like a pack of batteries, and it shows up, sometimes, tomorrow.
The thing that most makes me want to cancel is every time I try to find a movie to watch on Prime. I've never dealt with a worse interface, the new one is no better. They must actively want to make it hard to use, it's the only explanation.
They are heavily promoting the "Freevee" ad supported service, and the result is that the content included with Prime is mixed up with the Freevee stuff. Very annoying since I refuse to watch content with ads. Plus in general I think the streaming content on Prime isn't as good as it was even a couple of years ago (although I have to give them credit for having the complete extant episodes of "The Avengers.") .
Whether Prime is a good deal or not depends a lot on your personal situation. Where we live, deliveries to our door are no problem, and we have a Whole Foods nearby where we shop fairly regularly. I figure the Prime discounts at Whole Foods cover more than half the annual cost of my Prime subscription.
Same people designed their book search engine apparently, which is Mike Judge Idiocracy bad. It's almost comic. Especially since I give up quickly and go to Bookfinder instead, which is nearly always cheaper, even with paid delivery.
As for Prime streaming, I do all my searches through Roku, which will bring up Prime and everyone else who might have it.
This whole thing is weak tea. Kevin is making a mountain out of a molehill. When you throw down with the Man like that you've got to expect to click through a few pages of inquiry. Not saying Justice Alito is perfect, but I haven't heard him whining about getting stuck in Amazon Prime.
I've run into this sort of problem (from different companies) as well:
"I enter all my address information and supply a credit card and Condé Nast seems happy with everything. Then I push the "Confirm Purchase" button and an icon starts spinning. And spinning. And spinning some more. An hour later it's still spinning and nothing has happened."
All I can say is that if there's an option to pay via payPal, try that instead ...
I'd say, try a different browser. I get the same thing with online pizza orders: the perpetually spinning color wheel, when I use my preferred Firefox. But I've got it pretty well locked down.
My Chrome browser, on the other hand, will display ads and thus works for online ordering, not to mention streaming media. So set up an alternate browser with fewer security features and use it exclusively for ordering, etc.
According to the Wall Street Journal, 72% of all American households subscribe to Prime. I wonder how many of them actually want to subscribe to Prime?
I'm surprised it's that high. That suggests the overwhelming majority of US households over the poverty line subscribe. I would've guessed the number was more like 40-50%.
I used to subscribe myself when I lived in the US (I was an early adopter) but I can't make the numbers work living abroad. Can't say I found it was terribly difficult to cancel. That said, I support DOJ in this effort, at least based on what I've read. I know some folks on the right are raising hackles about this. But Amazon's an incredibly powerful, ruthless outfit, and I've got zero problem holding them to a high standard.
Well, it's the WSJ. If they surveyed their subscribers (the only Americans who matter), maybe 72% is correct.
It’s not bureaucracy, it’s theft. And fraud.
And wow - what do you call this insanity? Just like social media. Mostly annoying but occasionally deadly.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/20/nyregion/nyc-chinatown-fire.html
“Four people died Tuesday morning in a fire caused by lithium-ion batteries, just the latest in a series of fatal blazes in New York as delivery people in the convenience-addicted city increasingly rely on electric vehicles.”
“Even as we stand before the smoldering vehicles, he tells me that he can’t stress about his cheap e-bike catching fire; the chances of it happening would be like “winning the lottery”, he reasons. “What matters most is that it’s good and cheap.” Another onlooker is Terence, a 57-year-old Bronx e-bike owner whose father was a firefighter. But “I’ve had my e-bike now for five or six years, and I’ve been using this sort of battery, and I’ve never, ever had a problem,” he says.”
Amazing.
I'm so old that I can remember when people actually pedaled their bicycles.
Having set about destroying CNN, the CEO of Warner Bros now has his heart set on wrecking TCM,
https://deadline.com/2023/06/steven-spielberg-martin-scorsese-set-david-zaslav-meeting-regarding-tcm-layoffs-update-with-statement-1235422098/
This is the genius who changed HBO to Max, because, he said, HBO has low brand recognition in Europe, while 'Max' sounds like it's the most.
Reporter at Tom Ford's house noticed that when he turned on a TV anywhere in the house, it was tuned to TCM. That was me until I dropped cable. I miss it a bit, but not the new guys, and not having to set the recorder at 3.45 am to catch a silent movie. And how many times can you watch "Singing in the Rain"?
If they ever stream I'll get the ap.
We buy too much stuff from Prime to drop it, though I try to find alternative sources if possible. For all the money they make, their user interface sucks and the search function is abysmal. Its real easy to buy a Kindle Reader, but the interface to help you find e-books to read is practically useless, unless you are interested in a best seller by one of Amazon's best selling authors. I guess they make money on the readers, but not so much on the e-books.
What, they haven't conned you into subscribing to Audible?
I oversaw the Pcard program for a small bureaucracy and although the card holders knew they were forbidden from paying for Prime subscriptions they could not resist the savings. They had limited operating budgets. That was several years ago and a phone call cancelled the subscriptions then, but there were a lot.
I've canceled Prime several times after taking advantage of a free trial...yeah you have to click a a few times, but I would hardly call it "ridiculously hard."
Now, once around 2008-ish I canceled a Gold's Gym membership. I had to fill out a out a form, write a letter, and send it certified mail to do so. I couldn't even do it in person at the gym. I'd call that ridiculous.
As usual, you CANNOT get journalists involved in this sort of problem because, 99% being idiots, they will immediately latch onto the wrong thing, never let it go, and eventually get a law passed that fixes the wrong thing, not the thing that actually matters. (For a perfect example of this, those stupid bars at the bottom of every fscking web page asking for some sort of permission or other.)
The problem with Prime is NOT that it's difficult to cancel. I mean, FFS, type "cancel prime" in Google. The page that comes up is easy to understand, requires one click, and works. I have used it on multiple occasions.
The REAL problem with Prime is that they make it so obnoxious to AVOID signing up for it at multiple points in the checkout process. I have even (though I suspect this was a bug, not a deliberate policy) had one occasion where the system flat out would not move on to the next page until I signed up for Prime. (I did so, then immediately cancelled after my order went through).
But, like I said, you can RELY on journalist to latch onto the wrong part of the problem and never let it go. So I fully expect the end result of this to be a Prime that is both even easier to end but ALSO even more obnoxious to avoid in the first place, Gee thanks activists and your never-ending pool of ignorance-fueled stupidity-fortified outrage!
Wow! Never thought we'd agree on anything, but on this we surely do. Particularly the 'how do I cancel Amazon Prime' bit; there is simply no excuse for not doing so _before_ writing a piece on how difficult it is to cancel Amazon Prime.
Birth pangs of a new world, I would guess. Same with fake news. At a certain point people stop being suckers. I never signed up for Prime for the simple reason that at a certain point I stopped signing up for ANYTHING that asks for my credit card number. Can't count the number of times I interrupted a "free" software download when they wanted my credit card number, not for money they assured me but to verify my identity. Sure. Keep the app.
user name checks out
Deets? We're saying "deets" now?
That sounds harder than ordering an adapter for my QHYCCD PoleMaster to my StarAdventurer Gti from the EU. Got it, everything fits, now for a clear night!