Amazon’s Prime service was recently denounced by US authorities for making it very difficult for its subscribers to unsubscribe. The United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is taking action to prevent this from happening further.
One is to propose that companies with subscription services offer consumers the ability to unsubscribe with a click.
Subscription services are against it.
To no one’s surprise, the companies with subscription services disagree. As they allege, this would cause consumers to “unsubscribe by mistake”.
“If sellers are required to allow one-click cancellation by the consumer, accidental cancellations will become much more common, as consumers would not reasonably expect to remove their recurring goods or services with a single click,” The News/ Media Alliance, entity representing about 2000 newspapers in the United States and Canada. According to this group, its members receive “very few complaints” regarding the cancellation process.
The difficult task of canceling a service.
The FTC’s recent lawsuit against Amazon alleges that the company used “obscure patterns” or deceptive design practices to get users to sign up for its Prime service.
According to the lawsuit filed in a Washington court, Amazon purposely made the unsubscribe process complicated. The process was described internally within the company as “The Iliad.”