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.
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.
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
[2] https://www.aboutamazon.com/about-us/leadership-principles
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).
For Amazon Music, see 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.
The only issue: I seem to remember the process of switching from full Prime to Prime Video only was rather confusing and hidden.
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.
I hope employees can experience federal protection against this. We definitely need it.
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.
Exactly this: 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.
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.)
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=...
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)
Significant redactions around Amazon executives being aware of a "nonconsensual enrollment problem" and blocking any changes.
> the primary purpose of the Prime cancellation process was not to enable subscribers to cancel, but rather to thwart them. Fittingly, Amazon named that process “Iliad,” which refers to Homer’s epic about the long, arduous Trojan War. Amazon designed the Iliad cancellation process (“Iliad Flow”) to be labyrinthine, and Amazon and its leadership—including Lindsay, Grandinetti, and Ghani—slowed or rejected user experience changes that would have made Iliad simpler for consumers because those changes adversely affected Amazon’s bottom line.
A lot of the evidence in the complaint is completely redacted. FTC says "For now, the FTC’s complaint is significantly redacted, though the FTC has told the Court it does not find the need for ongoing secrecy compelling."
Wonder who allegorized as the customer for them, say Priam, Hector or Cassandra?
The first two are of course slaughtered, while the last is merely enslaved, IIRC. So I'd bet on Cassandra.
(I know many of you in urban areas are getting one day shipping but those of us in less favored geographies, such as the same ZIP code as AMZN warehouses, have seen two day shipping turn into five, which makes Amazon uncompetitive with going to the store or with other e-tailers which usually offer faster shipping.)
I agree it's not actually that hard to cancel, but the flow is so needlessly complex from a consumer perspective.
It should go straight to a page with three buttons and associated explanations:
1) Cancel at the end of the term 2) Cancel immediately and receive pro-rated refund (Since they offer this, I'm including it here - wouldn't expect it in general) 3) Keep subscription
But nah you have to scroll to the bottom and click “Continue canceling” where you’re taken the page you describe.
I don’t know how anyone can say this isn’t deceptive. If I click cancel membership, I shouldn’t be taken to a no-op interstitial page that makes me scroll to find a “continue canceling” button. That only exists to look like a “Canceled successfully” page.
Cancelling the 2nd time, they refunded me for the unused month. But maybe that was to do with the linked case rather than the goodness of their hearts.
I wouldn't read much into the internal names of things at Amazon. They're picked at random by nerds. I've seen apps internally named after space, Dragon Ball Z, Lord of the Rings, coffee and candy, etc. I'm pretty sure I've used another, completely different thing that's also called Iliad.
It's not malicious. It's just one of those Amazon things that make working there sometimes a chore.
https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/amazon-rosca-pu...
Also really frustrating, if I go to "Order Details" for an order that was delayed, the "Delivery Estimate" line shows the day it was actually delivered. Not the day it was originally estimated. I had to check my email to find the original delivery estimate.
Without prime I still order from them more than I feel good about, but only ever opt for the free, slow, shipping.
I’m at something like 30% deliver relay in 2 days, 40% deliver in less than 5 days, and 30% take the full five days.
combining your experience with my own, really sounds like they’re losing it.
When I signed up the guarantee (if not then?) was three days. At first it was good for small town Canada. But then the bottom fell out. But now something may say ship time a week or two but the thing arrives four days later. They're all over the place. One may think incompetence but it's benefiting me.
The other thing I hate it Prime Video more than once I've been two episodes from the end of a show and suddenly the show access is pulled. But oh look you can rent or buy it now for more $$$ on top of your subscription.
The UX, and product reliability are a completely different thing. I won't by any Amazon Basics products ever again, and many technical products (USB Cables, Chargers, etc) are a total crapshoot unless you buy from known mfg and even then who knows for sure.
The other components to the decision were the ever increasing volume of identical no-brand junk/counterfeit products with fake reviews, and the significant improvements in online inventory/buy inline pick up in store options from brick and mortar retailers.
When I signed up for Prime 13(?) years ago very few stores had accurate online inventory, now tons of them do, and the more limited selection actually feels like a benefit.
How? Patience. I add things I plan to order to my cart, and once the collection goes above the "free ship" threshold (currently $25) only then do I place an order.
Of course, on the order page they always default to "paid shipping" and force one to explicitly check the "free shipping" radio button to actually get free shipping.
Some years back it felt like Amazon deliberately delayed for an extra week any "free shipping" packages -- they would sit, waiting, for about a week, then packed, shipped, and arrived in about 4 days. I always attributed it to Amazon punishing those who chose to gain free shipping without signing up for prime. But over the last few years that "delay" has shrunk such that it no longer seems like "free shipping" packages get intentionally delayed to "encourage" prime sign-up next time.
Walmart offers Walmart Plus - I've never used it but it looks infinitely less sketchy. Between that and the fact that Walmart has its supply chain under control ("commingling", anyone) the choice is easy.
Most of the common items we order are 1-2 day shipping. Less popular items can be several days or more.
If it makes Amazon Customers 1% LESS LIKELY to unsubscribe, then $$MILLION DOLLAR AMAZONCOM MISSION ACCOMPLISHED$$.
I wonder how long until you have to call someone or mail in a 1,000 word letter on why you don't need Prime to cancel it.
Life Pro Tip: Be a shareholder, don't be a customer.
Maybe, but they are still miles better than most other online shops, so they still get to grow. Just for the return policy, they are kind of worth it.
I'm also pretty sure there is no way not to get no results. They don't want to say "sorry we don't have that". Instead they give you infinite inaccurate results that you need to go through to confirm that.
To cancel? You need to send in a letter via post. that may be changed but I'm guessing probably not.
Oh and the rewards used to be 5% of cash purchases now it's 0.5% dismal. Just a glorified spam farm for your info.
To be fair, that's all rewards/loyalty programs. But clearly, some are worse than others.
In any event, despite knowing that they'll try to get you to join Prime at every interaction, and despite trying not to do it, I accidentally clicked on the "Yes, sign me up for Prime even though I've been telling you no for literally years" button instead of the "No, just take my money and give me my stuff" button. It instantly signed me up for Prime. It didn't add it to my cart, or take me to checkout, or ask, "Are you sure? It's going to cost you $x per month." That was the really shocking part to me. The button didn't say, "One click purchase" or whatever they sometimes say when you're viewing a product. Absolutely no indication that it would be immediate and irrevocable.
I immediately canceled and had to go through 5 "Are you really really sure you want to cancel?" and "Can we just suspend it for now?" pages before I actually got to cancel. Not the worst I've seen, but certainly scummy and deceptive.
I've been clicking the "no-thanks" link for years -- as I've never signed up for, nor ever wanted to sign up for, amazon prime.
But, as I know it is going to show up, I'm not surprised by it in the least, and I know where to go to get past it without accidentally signing up for prime. Maybe the FCC complaint might finally make this nice dark pattern example finally go away.
Several large donations to the re-election funds of various congress critters.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displayText.x....
However, PayPal has some pretty slick tools for managing recurring payments and subscriptions, so I think I could manage it from the dashboard over there. Haven't checked yet.
On the other hand, it was not difficult to cancel.
Without Prime I don't see much of a value proposition in the flea market. Actually, even with Prime the value is questionable. If my wife didn't like Prime I would shut it off, and then I doubt I'd buy much from Amazon at all. For US customers, Walmart and Target do a decent job these days, without the commingled flea market (Walmart does have third party sellers, but they also tend to keep staples in their own inventory better than Amazon does, and they don't commingle.)
I cancelled Amazon years ago and have enjoyed not wading through the desperate side hustles and scams that Amazon essentially farms for data they can use to enter markets that they can then dominate.
How Doordash/Uber/etc exploit their drivers' lack of sense for depreciation costs / maintenance etc is just how Amazon exploits small business hustlers' lack of understanding of the power of omniscient market data.
1. no, I do not want a prime membership for $1.99 for 1 week
2. no, I want free shipping on these items (careful check if the order is split up in multiple shipments)
3. no, I want free shipping on this item.
8 out of 10 orders my stuff arrives earlier than the paid shipping option offered during checkout.
I personally accidentally resubscribed to prime once because of all this nonsense, so I can't imagine someone who is less careful.
What an example of how local optimizations within an organization can destroy long term customer value.
Many comments below discuss how Amazon has lost customer trust through these practices.
Most likely the PM or business lead was praised at the time for the short term revenue bump gained from these dark patterns.
It's not clear that they haven't profited more by having people retain prime through these patterns than they have lost through losing consumer trust.
People are not stupid and they learn. They will go to the place which works best for them and if Amazon stops working for them, they will go somewhere else.
One final comment is Amazon says one of its corporate values is customer obsession. On the retail side of Amazon, I am not seeing a lot of customer obsession. I am seeing a lot of short term thinking which gets Amazon more money today but will hurt their business in the long run. Here are some examples:
- Horrible content discover for books, movies and TV. Amazon just returns the results of a database query. It does not try to help you find content you will like. In TV shows, it lists each season as a separate show (web site, about 5-7 years ago).
- No way to distinguish between high quality non-fiction books and disinformation.
- Its book categories are very badly done. One example is I once went looking for computer science books. There were duplicates in the top 50 (i.e. one book listed more than once) and almost none of the books were computer science books. They were either “How to use technology X” books or “How to ace the programming interview” books. Some were also public policy books. This was about 10 years ago.
- Canceling Prime took too long and was far too hard. I will never subscribe again after I saw how they treated me when I unsubscribed. Note Netflix is easy to subscribe to and unsubscribe from.
I remember it clearly because it stood out as the only time I interacted with them (outside of buying something) that went without complication.
I'd love to see FTC target cancellations that require you to call a phone number and speak with someone. There's always a very long wait, and once you speak to someone you have to do gymnastics to get them to cancel.
To reward growth above all, and share price instead of profits does that, creates incentives to grow now at the cost of the future of the company and the trust of customers or even society.
Monopolistic behavior? Oh that’s _corporatism_ not capitalism! No it is very much capitalism. It’s the same with this growth at all cost thing you’re saying, as if that is a cat that can be put back in the bag.
Unless and until the state is a foe of capitalists things will continue to get worse. Look at how government operates today. The regulators may not be bribed directly but wow they sure do end up with good jobs after they leave government.
That is AWS & Amazon fulfillment.
Amazon shopping site is garbage at the level of peak eBay BS. Video/Music/Alexa are afterthoughts. Kindle is extremely mediocre hardware & software for how long its been around, but they priced out competition. Fire phone. Etc.
It's as if Amazon is really great at building the glue for other people to build their products on top of, but horrible at building products themselves.
If by "regulated", you mean that dark patterns should be prohibited, then I agree.
It means Amazon knows they are kings of online retail and have no problem abusing customers now.
Walmart online is sometimes cheaper, but also sometimes more expensive. Makes it really hard to make the switch. I have refused to give money to bad companies, but with the rest of the world being manipulated into giving them money, I realized I never made a dent.
I respect that you have to make decisions based on your own financial situation. For me, getting a few things for less money with the possibility that you might suddenly get hit with a big charge for something you didn't actually sign up for voluntarily is not worth it. To me it's like putting off fixing a car problem. You're saving money in the short term, but it could cause other much more expensive (or fatal) problems later. It's just too much risk for me. (But I have also been in a position where I had to put off a car fix because I simply didn't have the money. It absolutely sucked.)
If you have a valuable product, it should stand on its own as valuable. If you have to engage in deceptive practices, you're just accelerating your journey towards enshittification and destroying your brand equity. I guess that's fine for short-term gain/pump-and-dump, but it's unethical.
I'd rather die poor and honest, than rich and full of regret.
Even if it's designed correctly initially, the areas has a permanent bull-eyes for someone's promo packet to go and optimize.
What do you mean by "career limiting"? Just at the company in question, perhaps, but speaking up like that should be considered a good thing. If it's not, why would you want to continue working there?
Likewise once you find the https://www.amazon.com.au/mc page, cancelling your membership from there is about three clicks through the "are you sure?" and "are you really, really sure?" pages not too hard.
I've probably had one month free prime memberships about three times now just to get the fast delivery. In fact I had a reminder for three days time to cancel the latest membership, but I just did it now. (I usually let it run for twenty days or so.)
I wonder if there are consumer protection laws in Australia that are limiting the amount of dark patterning they can do.
Also Australian, my dad (70) came to me a month ago really stressed out about signing up for Prime accidentally. I managed to cancel it for him, which wasn't too hard, 3 or 4 pages where you have to click the right button to continue.
I think designs like what Amazon does here are easily navigable by us, but anyone who's not great at computers will struggle.
My Dad was adamant that he chose the delivery option without Prime, which is why this situation was really stressful for him...
I can get a free month of Prime, then 1 minute later cancel it (yes, you need to click through a couple screens), but keep it for the rest of the month. No need to set a reminder (even though Amazon offers to send you a reminder).
Not sure if it's still true, but you used to be able to cancel paid prime and get a partial month refund.
This is, of course, easily bypassed with browser controls, but I agree that it is a dark pattern which can trap less savvy people into pressing forward, because it seems there's nowhere else to go.
Edit: I checked again. It isn't there. Note that I said checkout, not my cart. It has big CTA buttons to go straight to checkout without first going to the cart.
It is there for the "cart" screen but once you get to checkout, you are stuck either proceeding or abandoning the page.
IMO that's a more significant problem.
The elderly seem to favor a lot of muscle memory over reading the screen, so any UI updates are painful.
I finally gave up and convinced myself it’s worth it to watch a few crappy movies on occasion and get my horrible used knock-off products shipped to me for free after paying for the shipping anyway as a markup on the product price.
In several years of membership it still has not managed to recommend a single thing I'm interested in. How are they so bad at this?
On the other hand, none of it is quite as bad as Marketplace Web Services, or even SP-API it's replacement.
2: I'm pretty sure financial operations have hard rules against this behavior that could be ported here.
3: Isn't Google in a kerfuffle for almost exactly this?
How many emails does Jeff@amazon.com get per day you think?
So when I contacted them, I got a refund for the $99, but I also told them they needed to pay me a $25 inconvenice fee for having to waste my time to call them for this....
They paid it.
Just used the free trial to get something in time before i left another country, and nicely wasted some $$ because i wasn't aware they will refund you for every remaining month.
I'd posit that suing news organizations would be perceived as more political than a retailer.
Or am I missing something important here?
Probably because newspapers are notorious to be the worst of the worst when trying to cancel free deals that automatically turn into expensive memberships.
Common methods are to only allow cancellation through telephone and only have open during work hours when most people can't call. If you manage to get hold of a human being, then you'll have to spend an hour arguing before they accept your cancellation. Then, even if you manage to get through it, you're missing the paper trail so the newspaper can just claim you changed your mind.
As late as yesterday, the Swedish Consumer Agency published a report on the issue.
Modulo that underlying dynamic, do you have a specific argument about how the status quo governmental power structure performing the tiniest bit of regulation on the status quo corporate power structure is "political" ? Or are we just supposed to not think too hard and jump to some kayfabe partisan narrative?
The FTC lawsuits against Meta and now Amazon are politically motivated and are a misuse of the the system if not outright corruption.
I don't appreciate being subject to one dark pattern after another just to buy an sd card or a bath towel.
