Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

They acknowledged exactly that, reversed the charges, and offered a full refund. I am again left wondering what you actually expected them to do.

View on HN

I don't understand the situation of the other n-71 users. Instacart send an email to them, but apparently the users didn't have to confirm the upgrade.

What happened with the mails that got lost, went to the spam folder, where ignored because it looks like standard press release, went to the secondary mail account?

There was a post by someone who seems to have worked there claiming the mistake was when they were querying for the users to send the email to. Basically 71 of us were not included in the results of that query so the email was never actually sent to us.

Read the post again. They did not reverse the charges. They gave 71 people the opportunity to claim a refund. What they should have done was automatically issued a refund to everybody they charged - not just the 71 who didn't receive the email - because they never should have charged anybody who didn't opt-in.

Are we reading the same post? "First, we’re going to refund all delivery fees paid by the people affected by this bug."

Instacart Express != Delivery Fees.

"Receive a full refund of the Instacart Express subscription fee immediately"

They have an option to do that - but if they take no action, they wont receive a refund. And that only applies to the 71 users effected by the bug. The people who got the email but took no action evidently can't even claim a refund.

Can you imagine the backlash if Apple started charging $99/year for iCloud and auto-billed everybody who didn't cancel the service?

There's the other issue of the notice itself. If they decided in March to make the change, how much time did they give customers to decide? Given the timeline, it seems like it was "effective immediately" rather than giving proper ahead of time notice.

Nonetheless, even if they did discuss refunding, the entire process seems shifty. Every service I use (I checked!) warns me five business days in advance by email that they are charging my card or sends a physical mail two weeks in advance. Instacart should be sending an email on each event with the delivery fee spelled out clearly.

>Second, we’re going to give these customers the choice to >either:

>Receive a full refund of the Instacart Express subscription >fee immediately >Continue as a subscriber of Instacart Express for the next >year. We’ll extend the end date of your subscription >through April 30, 2014. This option includes unlimited free >deliveries for orders over $35.

Still opt-out

Reply on news.ycombinator.com