FTC sues Amazon over ‘deceptive’ Prime sign-up and cancellation process

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.<p>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&#x27;t change to indicate that it was clickable, e.g., <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;VNlU9L9" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;VNlU9L9</a>.<p>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&#x27;s not free shipping, it&#x27;s not free grocery delivery, it&#x27;s not Music or Video, it&#x27;s not discount prices on Amazon retail website, and it is most certainly not any assurance of authentic goods.<p>Prime is snake oil.<p>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.<p>This lawsuit is long overdue.

FTC complaint: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ftc.gov&#x2F;system&#x2F;files&#x2F;ftc_gov&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;amazon-rosca-public-redacted-complaint-to_be_filed.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ftc.gov&#x2F;system&#x2F;files&#x2F;ftc_gov&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;amazon-rosca-pu...</a><p>Significant redactions around Amazon executives being aware of a &quot;nonconsensual enrollment problem&quot; and blocking any changes.<p>&gt; 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.<p>A lot of the evidence in the complaint is completely redacted. FTC says &quot;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.&quot;

I wouldn&#x27;t say the process of unsubscribing from Prime is &#x27;deceptive&#x27; but it sure has many steps. They tried just about everything to persuade me to stay except offer to bring back two day shipping.<p>(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.)

The whole Amazon.com experience has been getting worse and worse as the years go by. Everything from the products they sell, quality control, customer service, dark patterns in the UI, etc.<p>I wonder how long until you have to call someone or mail in a 1,000 word letter on why you don&#x27;t need Prime to cancel it.

Yeah, I got hit by this. I use Amazon maybe once or twice a year when I absolutely can&#x27;t find something anywhere else. They are absolutely my last choice of where to shop, but sometimes, it&#x27;s the only option.<p>In any event, despite knowing that they&#x27;ll try to get you to join Prime at every interaction, and despite trying not to do it, I accidentally clicked on the &quot;Yes, sign me up for Prime even though I&#x27;ve been telling you no for literally years&quot; button instead of the &quot;No, just take my money and give me my stuff&quot; button. It <i>instantly</i> signed me up for Prime. It didn&#x27;t add it to my cart, or take me to checkout, or ask, &quot;Are you sure? It&#x27;s going to cost you $x per month.&quot; That was the really shocking part to me. The button didn&#x27;t say, &quot;One click purchase&quot; or whatever they sometimes say when you&#x27;re viewing a product. Absolutely no indication that it would be immediate and irrevocable.<p>I immediately canceled and had to go through 5 &quot;Are you really really sure you want to cancel?&quot; and &quot;Can we just suspend it for now?&quot; pages before I actually got to cancel. Not the worst I&#x27;ve seen, but certainly scummy and deceptive.

To give you an idea what I see every time I checkout,<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;6PcJLFY" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;6PcJLFY</a>

It sure would be nice to have legislation mandating parity between sign up and cancellation. One-click signup? One-click cancel.

FTC press release direct link: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ftc.gov&#x2F;news-events&#x2F;news&#x2F;press-releases&#x2F;2023&#x2F;06&#x2F;ftc-takes-action-against-amazon-enrolling-consumers-amazon-prime-without-consent-sabotaging-their" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ftc.gov&#x2F;news-events&#x2F;news&#x2F;press-releases&#x2F;2023&#x2F;06&#x2F;...</a>

The UK government has a proposed law that customers must be able to end a subscription in a single clear process and all subscriptions entered into online must be capable of being ended online. Seems that if the US pushed this kind of law it&#x27;d have a significant effect on improving online services.

I recently discontinued a Prime membership we&#x27;d had for years and it was eye-opening how annoying and persistent the attempts to get us to sign up for it again are. Every time I buy something, I have to find the tiny link instead of the big button. One time the tiny link was broken and I literally could not complete my purchase until I tried a few hours later.<p>On the other hand, it was not difficult to cancel.

Slight OT, but wow.<p>What an example of how local optimizations within an organization can destroy long term customer value.<p>Many comments below discuss how Amazon has lost customer trust through these practices.<p>Most likely the PM or business lead was praised at the time for the short term revenue bump gained from these dark patterns.

Is this process new? I cancelled my Amazon account a couple of years ago, and was genuinely surprised at how easy it was. They didn&#x27;t even ask me the traditional &quot;Why are you cancelling?&quot; question.<p>I remember it clearly because it stood out as the only time I interacted with them (outside of buying something) that went without complication.

Glad to see this for the precedent, though Prime is far from the worst offender of employing dark patterns to cancel memberships.<p>I&#x27;d love to see FTC target cancellations that require you to call a phone number and speak with someone. There&#x27;s always a very long wait, and once you speak to someone you have to do gymnastics to get them to cancel.

Growth at any cost is creating a dystopian society. Tax share price increases so companies can focus again in making good products and providing good services.<p>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.

I still use amazon occasionally, but I think of it basically as interacting with a criminal that I know is completely dishonest and trying every trick to steal from me. Unfortunately there are sometimes still occasions when I have to hold my nose and do it, but they&#x27;re getting fewer and farther between.

Amazon is quickly moving towards a place where their plumbing&#x2F;infra is better than their consumer facing product.<p>That is AWS &amp; Amazon fulfillment.<p>Amazon shopping site is garbage at the level of peak eBay BS. Video&#x2F;Music&#x2F;Alexa are afterthoughts. Kindle is extremely mediocre hardware &amp; software for how long its been around, but they priced out competition. Fire phone. Etc.<p>It&#x27;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.

Dark patterns like this should be regulated. I&#x27;m tired of having to click through obfuscated menus to cancel subscriptions, notifications, and tracking.

IMO, The Amazon Audiobook sub&#x2F;unsub is even more deceptive... it <i>looks</i> like you might lose your existing purchases if you cancel (you don&#x27;t). But since I no longer commute, I had a pile of credits to where I was going to lose them, they extended me a couple times, in the end, I went on a spree of anything I was loosely interested in and just cancelled.

I&#x27;ve been tricked into signing up for Prime a few times. Luckily it was a free month each time, so I canceled as soon as I noticed and took advantage of the free offer. Thing is, over a certain value &quot;free&quot; means the free you get anyway and the Prime way. I stay away as much as I can. Hate them.

I remember when this was first rolled out. You&#x27;d go to buy something on Amazon, and the whole page would be a Prime ad, while some tiny little text would say something like &quot;no thanks take me to checkout.&quot; This change was when I knew that Amazon had jumped the shark and was certainly no longer &quot;obsessively customer focused.&quot; We had actually bought Prime accidentally via this method. Now in my family we make it a specific point that we won&#x27;t buy anything on Amazon.

There are so many of these processes which are so difficult that they border on the outright criminal, but the FTC goes after Amazon because it is a big political target to hit. Maybe from a utilitarian perspective it makes sense.

Good. UX and &#x27;product management&#x27; has moved from beauty and clarity to darkpatterns and psychological exploits.<p>If you have a valuable product, it should stand on its own as valuable. If you have to engage in deceptive practices, you&#x27;re just accelerating your journey towards enshittification and destroying your brand equity. I guess that&#x27;s fine for short-term gain&#x2F;pump-and-dump, but it&#x27;s unethical.<p>I&#x27;d rather die poor and honest, than rich and full of regret.

Try using the UK Amazon site if you want to see dark patterns for Prime subscription that are much worse than the US site has.

For anyone that works on something like this, either at Amazon or elsewhere, I&#x27;m genuinely curious how the meetings&#x2F;discussions around building a purposefully terrible UI go. I assume everyone knows what&#x27;s going on (i.e. making it difficult to cancel); does anyone ever speak up? Do people just go along with it?

Allegedly. There are like 200 dark patterns when you buy without being subscribed and even worse when unsubscribing

In Australia, I&#x27;ve found the &quot;get one month of prime free and we&#x27;ll expedite your delivery&quot; offers, while pushy, clear and easy enough to avoid.<p>Likewise once you find the <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com.au&#x2F;mc" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com.au&#x2F;mc</a> page, cancelling your membership from there is about three clicks through the &quot;are you sure?&quot; and &quot;are you really, really sure?&quot; pages not too hard.<p>I&#x27;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.)<p>I wonder if there are consumer protection laws in Australia that are limiting the amount of dark patterning they can do.

Interesting because I&#x27;ve found Amazon to be quite friendly (relatively speaking) when it comes to Prime subscriptions.<p>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).<p>Not sure if it&#x27;s still true, but you used to be able to cancel paid prime and get a partial month refund.

I need to buy a mattress and I had one in my cart from a week ago and last night I picked a different mattress and went to the checkout page. Then I saw there were two mattresses in it. It had the dark pattern of no cancel button so I had to click back and now I&#x27;m considering getting it elsewhere. Oh, and they also tried to get me to sign up for a Prime trial.

Didn&#x27;t they threaten to sue the cable&#x2F;ISP companies for the same thing? Whatever happened with that.<p>IMO that&#x27;s a more significant problem.

The Little Old Lady I help out with her computer got hit by this. Didn&#x27;t understand that she has signed up for Amazon Prime. I cancelled it but saw the trick. Basically, they re-used the &quot;Amazon yellow EXECUTE!&quot; style for purchases as part of the sign-up flow.<p>The elderly seem to favor a lot of muscle memory over reading the screen, so any UI updates are painful.

I’ve been subscribed to prime for a long time. I do remember unsubscribing several times, but somehow always end up back on the list.<p>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.

I pay for Prime annually, and yet somehow have a monthly &quot;Prime&quot; charge that no one at Amazon can identify or cancel.

I wanted to make a point about Prime videos recommendation engine.<p>In several years of membership it still has not managed to recommend a single thing I&#x27;m interested in. How are they so bad at this?<p>On the other hand, none of it is quite as bad as Marketplace Web Services, or even SP-API it&#x27;s replacement.

I recently signed up for Prime after resisting for years. The only reason I signed up was for the rapid shipping. I was doing a lot of traveling and I needed to be able to get some stuff quickly. After my current trip I will almost certainly do whatever is required to cancel.

Seems they&#x27;re also mad about Amazon delaying discovery and (allegedly) not giving them everything. Why don&#x27;t companies just use Signal&#x2F;some enterprise equivalent with auto deleting messages so by the time the investigation starts there is nothing to discover?

Tangential: Does anyone have a good alternative to privacy.com? I really don&#x27;t want to use Plaid to integrate but I basically need disposable&#x2F;controllable cards for online purchases because so many places have poor security and dark patterns.

Maybe punishment for this, because he is notorious for pushing the production&#x2F;efficiency envelope, perhaps the feds should confiscate Jeff&#x27;s boat. Allow taxpayers a ride.<p>How many emails does Jeff@amazon.com get per day you think?

My kid was excited to their own purchase on Amazon when they got a debt card. Somehow they ended up paying monthly for Prime. I managed to cancel and get a partial refund but it took multiple tries.

I had my credit card company block all Amazon prime charges a year or two after trying to cancel. The customer service rep said she had to do the same to cancel.

At least on mobile, it seems to be quite straightforward. Albeit still requiring multiple clicks and confirmations, the buttons are clearly named and visible

Good. Let’s hope the fine is so high it means the end for Amazon. But I doubt it, so we’ll probably see them continuing to offer shitty UX for years to come.

the Prime sign-up is really a dark pattern. I got caught once by clicking too quickly, fortunately they accepted to cancel when I contacted them immediately

This seems like a great use of FTC&#x27;s time. Bravo. Wish more of the headlines about enforcement actions were the same.

Indeed, I got tricked too into Amazon prime despite that I read everything very carefully.

Is it just me or is Reader Mode completely broken on this website?

I cancelled it and I am really upset that it signed me up again.

I bet the reparation will be three months of Prime.

I hope they do AWS billing next; good lord what a pain that is to turn off.

heh, a few years ago I cancelled my Prime membership but Amazon still charged me the $99 for the membership after I canceled...<p>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....<p>They paid it.

...you can use your &#x27;local&#x27; AZ account for other countries, which i was used to, so i assumed Prime would work like that too - nope, that is bound to only the specific store you subscribed at. And they couldn&#x27;t (wouldn&#x27;t) transfer it.<p>Just used the free trial to get something in time before i left another country, and nicely wasted some $$ because i wasn&#x27;t aware they will refund you for every remaining month.

Hmm, this depends on the customer. If the customer is savvy, they know when they&#x27;re being &#x27;duped&#x27; and know about dark patterns and such. Financially savvy people who practice good financial hygiene don&#x27;t get &#x27;deceived&#x27; as much. Most people don&#x27;t care that much if they&#x27;re charged monthly for Prime, it&#x27;s a minor detail in their spending budget.

Lol, it&#x27;s not deceptive at all. I routinely sign up for the free trials and then cancel a couple of days before the trial ends.

Wild the FTC isn&#x27;t suing the NYTimes, WSJ, or every other paid news outlet for far more egregious cancellation process practices. Almost as if the FTC is a political weapon.

This administration selected the current FTC commissioner because of an op-ed attacking Amazon and a glowing profile both published in the New York Times.<p>The FTC lawsuits against Meta and now Amazon are politically motivated and are a misuse of the the system if not outright corruption.