161–170 of 412 posts
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I think it costs them a transaction fee from the credit card company each time too and affects their future ability to use the merchant network when they get too many chargebacks.
Unfortunately it can also really seriously effect your credit rating, but then again anything can do that and credit ratings are silly.
I actually went through exactly this with Dropbox a couple weeks ago. It took me two tries, the first time I mis-read / fell into one of the dark patterns. I'd made up my mind long before I ever went to the website to cancel and all this did was make me grumpy and justify my decision even more. Clearly it adds to their retention numbers somewhere or it would be dropped, however I will not use dropbox again in the fac…
What are you looking to use next? I've thought about a raid NAS but have not brought myself to going through with it.
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Can you expand further on this?
Say you sign up for a gym. The agreement is for $50/month with a year commitment. You give them a credit card to pay. 6 months in, you cancel your credit card (or it expires or whatever). The fact that they can't bill you doesn't change that you agreed to the plan and that you owe the second 6 months anyway. That's a debt and the gym can (and some do!) choose to go after you for it in whatever legal way they feel. Th…
Services that care about cancellation and charge backs always charge the full duration upfront at the reduced price. Not month to month.
The gym, the newspapers or tinder will charge you ahead for the next month. If they can't charge you, they terminate your access and it ends the contract. You stop paying and you stop being able to use the service.
Which do you think the company cares about more?
Retain with pain.. The other day I tried to delete my udacity account. No button in settings, I mailed support, they asked my to mail legal (apparently they don't fwd mail..). From legal I received the following response: Hello, We are in receipt of your request to delete your account. We are sorry you want to leave the Udacity family; you will be missed. Before we can proceed with fully processing your request, we n…
I know they wont miss our 220ish users, but I hope enough individuals see your post to put a dent in their numbers.
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Reading about the experiences of others. Or asking around.
It's sad that that's the only way at this point. Maybe sites will start bragging about how easy it is to leave if it becomes taboo enough to make it hard to leave (akin to "100% money back guarantee if you don't like it!"). Until then, someone's gotta be the first to try the poison.
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The NYT at least lets you use PayPal. When I wanted to cancel I couldn't even get through to a rep, so I just switched my payment method to PayPal and then deauthorized the recurring payment from PayPal.
This is the same reason I pay bills via my bank bill pay rather than giving EFT access to the folks who send me bills. One point of control, and the bank is invented to help me with payment issues rather than throw up roadblocks.
I have been working as a ux consultant for 15 years now, there are two things that are serious problems: 1. Forcing your users into actions they don’t want to take (dark patterns) 2. Having users delete their accounts and data because you didn’t install enough hurdles on their way to the delete button I am actually not very sure what we see here, is it a dark pattern? It could be, but at the size of Dropbox I could e…
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> I am actually not very sure what we see here, is it a dark pattern?
It sounds like you've been in the grey/black side of the UX industry for too long, and have become a bit institutionalised.
eg You're not see things clearly.
If possible, maybe take a break from the UX space for a year or so, and do something else? Might help to regain your sense of things. :)
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How do you determine how easy it is to leave before you actually need to do it? Before even signing up?
Reading about the experiences of others. Or asking around.
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The NYT at least lets you use PayPal. When I wanted to cancel I couldn't even get through to a rep, so I just switched my payment method to PayPal and then deauthorized the recurring payment from PayPal.
So much this. I LOVE paypal as a user because of it. All my subscriptions go through it and if it isn't offered via paypal, I'll reconsider. I love to see a list of all my subscriptions with the ability to unilaterally cancel my subscription at any time via PayPal... I never even contact the companies I 'unsubscribe' from... I simply remove their access to my paypal.
Some consider paypal to be archaic, but it's bleeding edge payment tech when placed alongside traditional credit cards.