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Comment by ezfe | Hacker News Reader

What's deceptive about it is you click the first link to cancel your benefits, then each subsequent page is basically a quiz: "which button will boot you out of the cancel flow and which button will proceed to the next page"

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

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I just cancelled. The first click to cancel your membership takes you to a page that says “you still have N days of your membership!” which is where you’d be able to close the page knowing your service was canceled if the service was honest.

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.

If you just cancelled, you saw improvements they made as a result of FTC pressure. Before April 2023 the process was much more difficult.

As someone who regularly gets the 1-week trial of Prime (and cancels), the cancellation process has gotten a lot less deceptive recently. E.g. they used to invert the colors of the buttons to make the "Cancel Membership" look like the negative option, etc. These days it's still unnecessarily long, but requires less double-takes to figure out.

That's a direct result of this lawsuit.

> Under substantial pressure from the Commission, Amazon changed its Iliad cancellation process in or about April 2023, shortly before the filing of this Complaint.

- page 43, https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/amazon-rosca-pu...

Oh for sure - I agree that the process is not something a reasonable person can't do - I use the 1 week trial of prime every time I order (and then cancel it immediately).

I ran into this trying to cancel a free-trial a month ago. Or rather I thought I'd cancelled it and got charged.

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.

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