A leason I learned many long years ago is not to treat a customer cancelling a subscription as a lost customer, but as a customer going on holiday from you.
When you make the cancellation process smooth and friendly, if that customer is reconsidering at a later date, they will remember that their last interaction with you was a pleasent one.
If it's hard to unsubscribe - then their last memory is a bad one, and it's even harder to persuade that person to resubsubscribe again.
This is admitedly more applicable to industries with a lot of annual churn between suppliers - such as insurance, internet providers, power suppliers etc -- but it should be a rule of thumb for all companies.
Good lord yes. I subscribed to the Wall Street Journal for a bit, but then ended up low on cash and needing to cut back on spending. Of all the subscriptions I stopped at that time, they were the most annoying. Because, even though I was able to sign up easily online, there was no way to cancel other than calling them. That disparity in ease between starting and stopping my subscription is why I will never pay them again.
I was low on money and cancelled my Audible subscription for a month only to realize I lost all my tokens. I never resubscribed because of that.
I later learned that they have some special limited "pause subscription" mode that retains tokens, but I didn't see that when I was cancelling, and I shouldn't have to research different ways to cancel a subscription.
I just cancelled audible this morning, and did not see any pause subscription. It may have been there, but I was annoyed with other dark patterns. "no! i want to stay subscribed!" as a bright orange button, and "continue cancellation" as a muted grey button, for example.
When subscribed to audible through apple I get "your credits never expire" clause... I've cancelled my subscription, subsequently restarted when I need more credits, and cancelled again... still have 4 credits.
Exactly, I failed to cancel the subscription the first time due to probably that dark pattern.
I pressed the Submit button but the next page fooled me so I thought I could close the browser tab.
I realized I was still charged a few days later, I went back to ensure I was cancelled where I realized I didn't complete the flow because you have to click "Continue cancellation" on the page that you land on despite thinking you’ve completed the process.
NYTimes used to be like this, but last time I looked they had fixed it. Making unsubscribing hard is just such a slimy dark pattern. Immediately creates anger and hatred from users. I guess someone has demonstrated math that shows it is more profitable in some cases, but it is still disgusting.
> I guess someone has demonstrated math that shows it is more profitable in some cases
Don't underestimate how deeply, fundamentally, mind-bogglingly incompetent most decision-makers are at most companies. Not only do these people have no evidence to suggest it's more profitable (long-term, anyway), they literally do not care. The vast majority of decisions made at the vast majority of corporations in the U.S. today are driven by the Principal Agent Problem, made by people who will never be held account for any of their decisions, nor suffer any consequence for any downstream or long-term effects of anything they do. It's all just a game of who can suck the most blood out of the company short-term before finding another host. These virulent parasites will never give a shit about such mundane concepts as "supporting data".
I'm convinced this is one of the most significant social problems in the U.S. A huge number of American adults spend a third of their lives in an environment where there is no acting towards a common good, and in many cases are actively encouraged to behave in antisocial, cutthroat ways towards other people. There is no way everybody just leaves that at work when they go home and suddenly become good and caring citizens. That's not even counting all of the direct damage they cause directly through the business itself.
Can confirm that the NYT has fixed it, as I recently went to go see how much of a pain in the ass it was to cancel. I was at least considering cancelling because I just don't read NYT enough to really justify the expense. Since it's such a huge PITA, I chose a day when I had some time, because by golly I'm sticking with the process to the end, no matter how long I sit on hold with "customer retention".
Oh, you can just click a few "are you sure?" buttons, and that's it? All done online? Well, it isn't that much money every month, and I do read the NYT. If I can easily cancel, then...oh, what the heck, let's keep the subscription.
I cancelled my NYT subscription a couple of years ago and had to chat with customer "service" to cancel. One of the things they asked me about was keeping the crossword subscription ($20/year), which I might have done. But I was so irritated by the annoying process that I just wanted to cancel everything. So they definitely lost money thanks to their "customer retention" tactics.
Same here. And you have to call on East Coast business hours (I'm west coast). I am a crossword aficionado and would enjoy having the NYT crossword puzzle fresh each day. No way am I keeping a subscription that was so hard to cancel.
The Wall Street Journal lets you cancel your subscription if your address is in California, but not if it's in another state. If I wanted to cancel my subscription, I'm just going to pretend to move to California for a day or two. Maybe that's fraud and I'll go to prison for the rest of my life, but it's still better than calling them.
>” I'm just going to pretend to move to California for a day or two. Maybe that's fraud and I'll go to prison for the rest of my life, but it's still better than calling them.”
That’s the best part, California’s prisons are over capacity so you’re likely just going to be given parole and community service! /s
When I canceled my NYT Crossword subscription (they got rid of the convenient .puz file format that could be downloaded), I had to call.
I found the CA law and explained to them how what they were forcing me to do was illegal in the state of CA, started citing the law, and the NYT rep immediately tried to cut me off so it wouldn't be recorded, I assume.
Exact same experience, I signed up for them as part of a class in college and honestly liked their reporting. If they hadn't made me call them and sit through a call center lecture I would probably be paying for them now that I have money.
Both the WSJ and the NYT used to be awful. But now, in California, this sort of thing is no longer a problem. We have a rule here that subscribing online means you should be able to cancel online.
That makes me want to subscribe to companies' services like this even less: if they need a law to force them to treat customers right, then I really don't want to give them my money.
I checked the date on the linked article and it's from yesterday. online "geo-ip" stuff always says i live in georgia, dallas, or oklahoma - and one time tacoma!
Dallas makes the most sense as that's where at&t's fiber terminates from this area. If i lived a little further south it would go to either georgia or whatever major city is along I-10 in texas, don't feel like looking at the map.
Starlink used to show me near chicago, but now is pretty consistently also dallas. T-mo is most likely to show me on the east coast.
This is why I like subscribing to things through iOS (and iPadOS). There’s one place I can check to see all my subscriptions and stop any of them with a click or two.
When I want to subscribe to something on my iPad, I don’t think about it very long because I know it’s going to be easy to quit. It will sometimes cost more but I’ve been happy to pay it because that’s what easy quitting is worth to me.
And this is why the most clamor for sideloading etc on iOS is from other companies, not users: They would love to fleece the users with as few interventions in between as possible.
Sideloading would absolutely benefit users. Even just being able to choose and install your own web browser would have enormous benefits. Android users know.
Exactly. My personal example: wanting to cancel due to shady advertising practices, my newspaper said i owed them money for an additional subscription I didn't make, and then threatened to send it to a collection agency.
I hate to turn my back on local news, but its owned by Gannett now who've ruined it, so I guess I'm ok with it failing. Sad though...
Yep, when I switched away from Sprint, it was a huge pain, switching from T-Mobile was so easy I felt a little bad for them being so helpful. Of course, the choice doesn't really exist anymore, but I was only interested in going back to one of them.
And not just that person, but everyone else as word gets around. Another commentor mentions Wall Street Journal; I’ve often considered subscribing to WSJ, but the horror stories I’ve heard about unsubscribing have pushed me away.
The Economist's unsubscription process is also terrible: looong hold on the phone and then many minutes of repeating to the person on the other end, no I'm not going to reconsider, cancel my subscription. It's a great magazine but heaven help you if you decide to stop getting it.
And, as suggested above, this has actually kept me from re-subscribing again later.
Thanks for sharing. I've heard they're good, but comments like this and my firsthand experience with other publications makes me feel better about not subscribing to anything.
I don't understand why companies don't think this way. AT&T and Verizon both screwed me on the way out. Verizon decided to suck $15 more, and since I wasn't expecting another last bill, It got a $15 late fee so they got $30 out of me. In exchange, I've banned them from my life. AT&T made cancelling a royal pain in the ass, and also slapped me with some stupid fee.
T-Mobile, Google Fi, Ting, and (somewhat) Mint mobile all made it really easy to leave. I've been back to them a few times and I recommend them to others in my life. That $30 from Verizon cost them $100 per month in revenue for what likely would have been many, many years. It's just such a silly short-term approach IMHO.
Sometimes a particular company is exceptionally bad (looking at you, Comcast), and leaving them as a statement is a fine solution. But in general, what I feel I've learned, I can't boycot every company that treats me poorly, because I'd not have anyone left to take my business to. People vote with their feet, or something, but only up to a point, I guess.
The poster you replied to named a bunch of mobile phone service companies that treated him well. (I can personally vouch for several of those same companies BTW: I had no trouble leaving them.) Why would you not boycott companies that treat you like crap, when there are clear alternatives that don't?
They were talking about it being hard/easy to leave, which seemed like a single data point. I'm on T-Mobile, and I like them, and I'm not surprised to hear that they have good support for leaving. But I still have had at least one experience where I had to furiously remove myself from their store over some bs they pulled. Should I now boycott them? I'm not even talking about the principle of second chances, but just that I'd run out of providers real quick if I had to boycott them for every one or two offences, as much as maybe I'd like to.
There's dozens of mobile providers. What kind of "bs" are they pulling that you'd want to boycott them all? I had several in the US, and all the smaller ones (MVNOs) were fine: they did exactly what they claimed as far as billing and level of service. The only reason I left any of them was because I found better network coverage, or moved. I honestly don't understand why you'd want to support a company that treats you poorly when you have SO many alternatives.
Misplaced incentives. Hardly anyone is recognized, let alone rewarded, for the good impact of something they did years ago (like implement customer friendly policies); yet, they’re immediately penalized for what looks bad on a spreadsheet (like losing a customer, e.g. by letting them leave without repercussion such as termination fees).
> When you make the cancellation process smooth and friendly, if that customer is reconsidering at a later date, they will remember that their last interaction with you was a pleasent one.
When I purchase a new subscription the first thing I do is cancel renewal so I can do it manually. When a site makes this easy I'm actually much more likely to end up re-subscribing and leaving it on automatic since I know I'll be able to have peace of mind and cancel any time.
> A leason I learned many long years ago is not to treat a customer cancelling a subscription as a lost customer, but as a customer going on holiday from you.
I was waiting for "so that's why we re-subscribe customers after a 6-month hiatus / every time we update our mail delivery service". At least that's what some companies have done to me...
This is why I keep coming back to Netflix. It's a simple process to subscribe or unsubscribe. I don't find enough interesting content to fill 12 months of use but I love that I can watch for a couple months, go away for the summer, and then pick it up again as the days get colder and darker from my sofa with just a remote or a click of the trackpad.
Yep. I wanted to temporarily cancel the NY Times. The process was horrible and the first time I called they said it would cancel at the end of the month and it didn't so I had to call them again and go through the whole horrible process again.
I will never resubscribe again because the cancellation process was so horrible.
what is really funny is that someone with an MBA was working behind the scenes to claim this suscriber churn flow dark pattern was A/B tested, and the test "conclusively demonstrated" that action B (hiding the cancel/forcing user to call/etc) resulted in XX % less churn, ergo resulting in additional YY revenue/quarter.
Yet, anyone with basic reading comprehension can read this thread, and conclude these dark patterns are destroying the brand with existing customers.
How can they know for sure though? It's not like they can look at their spreadsheets and definitively say "these subscribers over here" wanted to cancel but stayed because they couldn't figure it out.
This is a great way to think about it, and upon reflection I definitely operate in this way.
I'd love SiriusXM at the promo rates they offer, or even at full price in a month where I know I'll be on the road for a while. I will never re-subscribe because they make cancelling so hostile.
They’ve (SiriusXM) made cancelling a lot easier as of late. They even give partial refunds and let you pause. I wouldn’t say it’s perfect, but I have been able to hop on and off over the last year without major heartburn.
How does it work now? When I did it twice before (including semi-recently), I could only do it via chat or over the phone - either option took about 5 minutes and required talking with somebody.
The Boston Globe, for example, first introduced online cancellation in fall of 2020 to a portion of its subscriber base after it received an influx of tens of thousands of new subscribers at the beginning of the pandemic, Tom Brown, Globe vice president of consumer revenue, said.
“We wanted to make sure that didn’t clog up the phone lines and create a poor experience for any subscriber calling for any reason,” Brown said in an email. “We then started making it available to more subscribers based on market research that we conducted that showed subscribers wanted this.”
~~~
Reads like: After I hired a market research firm to gather opinions from my brother, I decided to stop poking him with a stick.
I'd certainly like everything to be easily canceled online.
Having said that I wonder if that example with the Boston Globe is sort of the old "Be Radiohead" example. In that situation Radiohead sold their album online for whatever you want to pay. It was touted as a good way to do business, because Radioheads sold a lot.
Later someone wrote satirical article telling other bands how they could do the same. Step 1 was "Be Radiohead".
In reality the reason for all the sales were ... they were Radiohead.
I wonder if the Boston Globe is at that scale where they can do that, while other places might not see any new subscribers.
The globe defaults to everyone gets a really high price, then if you try to cancel they immediately start offering you better deals until you agree to not cancel.
It's a stepped thing.. you start at $30/month. Try to cancel and they offer you $20/month. Say you still want to cancel and they go through a series of discounts till it's < $5/month, maybe as low as $1/month.
When I went through this before online cancellation the process was so gross every new offer made me more determined to cancel even though the better offers were cheap enough to want to keep it. The whole process made me feel like I'd been ripped off.
Not really the same as Radiohead offering to let you name your price from the beginning.
How long do these prices last? Seems like the super-high price would reduce their top of funnel, since people like me (who end up on the site infrequently) would never consider it at the listed price.
Usually if you somehow end up in this kind of sales funnel, you get offered a ridiculously cheap first year subscription. Say $20 for first year, but then it's $12 a month after that. You call to cancel, and they'll keep dropping the price until it's back to that $2 or $3 a month.
You're right — they also have low-price options at the beginning. I just tried loading an article and, what do you know, I was "selected" to be able to subscribe for just 99¢!
I think that much of the importance of that step might have been lost in the satire.
The lesson is "create something that people truly want to pay for". If you manage to that goal, then cancellations should naturally decrease and/or sales should increase (depending on your revenue model).
Companies with an abusive cancellation policy are essentially saying that their product sucks and they need to try and hold customers hostage to maintain revenue. That is not long run sustainable.
> The lesson is "create something that people truly want to pay for".
No, that's not the entire lesson. If an unknown indie band had created an identical album, it would not have made anywhere near the same amount. If we're going to distill it down to "what people want to pay for," people usually want to pay for something they think other people like.
We are saying the same thing from two different perspectives.
Yes, a small indie band would not have the same following as Radiohead at first. They need to build up a series of highly valued releases over time. Which is really all distilled into the "be Radiohead" line.
Or to make it less vague, your pricing and billing strategy may need to change over time. When/if you develop a history of delivering highly valued products and releases you will have the opportunity to explore alternate pricing models.
However, I still think you can distill much of this down to "create something that people really want". If you can do that the pricing part gets a lot easier.
Well, ok, but if your definition of "create something that people really want" is "build up a series of highly valued releases over time [until you are as popular as Radiohead]", then it seems like you're just saying "be Radiohead" in a more confusing way. So I'm not really sure what the point is. Step 1 is still "be Radiohead" because smaller bands can't do the same thing without first following many other difficult steps.
But then that pricing model applies to, what, like 20 bands? Okay, so those 20 bands should do that and every other band should do what Radiohead did until they sell 30 million albums worldwide.
The Boston Globe was notorious for years as the primary offender in the "impossible to cancel" list. Offering them as a positive example for ease of cancellation past, present or future eliminates all credibility. It's like offering ... Joseph Stalin for a humanitarian prize.
They may have considered difficulty cancelling as a feature. It would probably look good in the retention metrics. Companies often hire consultants to tell them things that they already know but don't like to admit to themselves.
Man, the Boston Globe is way too expensive, but I'm still subscribed. After the marathon bombing, it hit me how crucial it is to have local reporters who aren't just on TV. Even though they get on my nerves sometimes, I keep shelling out the cash. I've lived in places where the last real paper shut down, and it's a massive loss that never gets replaced.
I'd say about 15-25% of Meetup's revenue comes from people who don't know they are still paying for a group, because its a subscription that only gets billed once every 6 months. So many groups are dead. Before the pandemic it might of been maybe 5-10% but afterwards its much much higher.
Odds are anyone you unsubscribe from will spam you in a newsletter. Even if you opt out, you'll be re-added a year or 2 later. I've learned to use certain gmail for certain sites/services to prevent them spamming up my personal domain emails.
I really hope they make it 1 click to cancel as a law, I've had to call in my CC as stolen at least 2 or 3 times to end something or to prevent some trial period from charging me.
I switched to using a custom domain + catchall email setup. So when I go to a retail store that requires an email to get a receipt, I just give them STORENAME@mycustomdomain.com and it will get delivered into my inbox. Retailers that don't honor the unsubscribe button just get the email address created and then set to bounceback as undeliverable.
This also does a great job of catching data leaks or willful sale of client and customer data.
I regretted using the main domain for that, as some junk mailers either cotton on to there being a catchall or just chance that many domains have many users with common names, so sometimes I would get several messages for andrew@domain.tld, brian@domain.tld, carl@domain.tld, etc.
These days I use STORENAME@sub.domain.tld which seems to attract a lot less junk, practically none, by the above manner. The catchall on the main domain was replaced by large forwarding list of the addresses I'd got legitimate emails from, with anything else now bouncing as usual.
> Retailers that don't honor the unsubscribe button
It also protects against when retailers are hacked and their mailing list taken, or them selling it on either as BAU or during the fire sale as they go out of business.
> I would get several messages for andrew@domain.tld, brian@domain.tld, carl@domain.tld, etc.
I read about that sometimes (or well, rather the less specific one where you’d get generally random spam to your domain), and in over 7 years of doing website@exmaple.org I never had this happen. I wonder what the difference between people like me, and people like you is?
It doesn't happen often that I notice, a lot of examples of it end up automatically marked as junk so I only see them if I peer in there for any reason or look at the mail server's daily/weekly/monthly incoming mail report which will list them. Perhaps your junk filtering is more efficient than mine!
It may also depend upon what lists we've ended up on. If only a few junk senders are using the trick, the others deciding it isn't worth it without knowing there is a catch-all isn't worth it and deciding working out there is a catch-all with sufficiently few false positives is too much hassel, then it is quite possible it only happens to some of us.
It could also be that some people have done it to pad out email lists they sell, and so most of the others aren't really using the trick but just parroting the list they have bought. Again, this would explain the issue only being seen by some.
My domain is a .net that has been active for about 23 years at this point, so compared to newer domains its presence in spam mailing lists will have been subject to more fads in the junk industry over time.
"You never had this happen?" I have had a catch all email for over 3 decades and spammers practically try everything under the sun for the local part of the email address. It's like the usernames you see in the "random background ssh noise" of the internet.
On more recent decades I have seen bots even split by separator, e.g. if prefix.suffix@example.com is published online, they will try prefix@example.com and suffix@example.com.
> e.g. if prefix.suffix@example.com is published online, they will try prefix@example.com and suffix@example.com
That is likely someone trying to programmatically circumvent filtering based on catch-all-ish naming conventions, like gmail's support for usernamepart+anythingelse@gmail.com all going to usernamepart@gmail.com and similar facilities offered by other email services.
Sending to <something1>@dom.tld and <something2>@dom.tld as well as <something1><puntuation><something2>@dom.tld seems like a potentially useful heuristic. Though it may create excess false addresses, if spammers care about that sort of thing (that depends on whether the chance hit on real addresses is worth the need to transmit many more messages that will fail/bounce and maybe help train spam identification systems).
Yeah but you look really weird trying to give this email in person or over the phone. I used to do that but these days I just set up a filter rule to move emails from their domain to junk. Most stuff that comes from email leaks gets caught but the spam filter already.
> Yeah but you look really weird trying to give this email in person or over the phone.
I really don't care about that. If anyone questions it I'm honest: “it lets me filter messages into folders/tags so I can prioritise easily, and it lets me easily block your company if it sends too much or sell my details on”. I once had someone (an in-physical-store “signup and we'll send you some vouchers” deal) refuse to accept such an address to which my response was “Fair enough, but if you won't take that I'm not signing up, you aren't getting other contact details out of me”. Other than that one example I've had no trouble in this regard, the only other significant reactions I've had being something along the lines of “I might have to start doing that”.
Never let commercial interests embarrass or guilt you into behaving in their favour!
I used a sub-domain for the catch all which has one or twice over the years caused an issue due to bad validation, not liking the extra “.” unless it is near the end like in .co.uk, at which point I step away because a company that can't deal with a perfectly valid email address domain part probably can't store anything securely!
> Most stuff that comes from email leaks gets caught but the spam filter already.
It isn't just leaks, it is when the company itself sends too much or gives your details to its parent/child/partner companies (most likely there was a non-optional, or at least default-on, checkbox that give them permission to do this). That sort of thing is less likely to be caught by general spam filters, though admittedly the volume or that is likely rather lower so the irritation likewise.
An email address is an email address. Who cares if it looks weird? It's far more weird to sell someone's data or not respect if they wish to be contacted.
If necessary, blag it. Walmart? `wallace.martin@yourdomain.suffix`.
There are more and more sites that now demand you use a hotmail/outlook/bigco email address. If you try to use your own domain, they'll say "sorry, you need to use your personal email for this - for business use contact our sales department".
I can't say I've ever seen this, and I've used my own domain for decades, I think it is unlikely to really happen. I can imagine services refusing known temporary address domains and giving that response as a “fake” error message rather than honestly saying they don't accept temporary addresses because they have less value.
Do you have any specific examples if it has actually happened for a non-throw-away address? I'll make sure I don't waste time even trying to subscribe to their services!
Banks and utility companies aren't an uncommon one. When your method of account recovery is email, it's far more trustworthy to trust a major email provider than it is to trust Joe Schmoe running his mailserver at home to keep it secure, or to trust that someone isn't going to be abusive.
Example: scorned employee or spouse, they redirect or copy email to x address, and they gain access to accounts via that.
"That could never happen."
It's happened plenty of times that it's a consideration for a lot of major institutions, and it's happened enough that the radio and bus stops in the UK have ads warning people of the signs of financial abuse.
That's without even getting into people not having automatic renewal set on their domain and losing the domain.
I use a .name address (a .name domain with a catch-all address), and have only once had it rejected by any automatic process. I've had a couple of humans question it, though.
I thought it unlikely too. But our local utility (BC Hydro) won't allow me to use hello@<firstname><lastname>.com because their system flags it as a generic corporate email address. According to them you must use the email address of a specific person in your company (paraphrased).
But I got this error when updating my residential account.
Since when did companies get to decide what is or isn't a valid email address?
I have no idea. All of my domain names are ones I registered decades ago. But, in the US anyway, I don't think there is an ISP that doesn't give you an email address as part of the service. You could use that to register your domain.
You certainly could use it to register your domain, but then, arguably, the default "personal" email address is the one that isn't on your own domain, even if that's what we consider "personal" as you could forget to set automatic renewal, the payment method could fail, and somebody could register your domain and gain access to the accounts and setup catch-all email, and parse database leaks for @domain.suffix addresses.
I do understand where you're coming from though. I remember the days of setting up my first ever domain via post in the UK! I still have the letter lmao.
> the default "personal" email address is the one that isn't on your own domain
I don't follow. That reasoning would mean that if you use a gmail account, for instance, that isn't a "personal" email address either. It seems to me a personal email address is an email address you use for personal communications as opposed to business communications.
Where that address is hosted, or what domain its on, isn't relevant to the question.
And you are very welcome not to believe the commenter because both of your experiences are anecdotal n+1.
I have seen this happen with increasing frequency, but I am admittedly terminally online, and of all the sites I visit, it's probably 2 in 10 that don't allow me to use my own domain, but this is again completely anecdotal and based on the sites that I visit and I am not representative of the average user whatsoever.
While this generally works as a way of filtering that one company if needed, it doesn't protect against spam when if they have their mailing lists stolen (or selling them is BAU), and many spammers know about this and will send to the base address instead.
Unless you automatically file anything without +something as junk, of course.
I apply labels and `skip inbox` via Gmail filters automatically. It's probably the one redeeming quality of Gmail at this point and is what keeps me using it so that email can be processed prior to it sending a push notification to my devices.
With that said, it's a niche use anyway, stick to the catch-all on your own domain whenever possible, and for anything else, it's a fringe case anyway.
I use Fastmail's masked emails all the time and nobody minds at all. I just used another one at H&M yesterday, which I do every single time because you get 15% for creating a new account with them. I don't even read it out to them. I just hold up my phone and show it to them, which they appreciate.
Just remember that misrepresenting your identity as a way to get a benefit (like a discount) is technically wire fraud. You're unlikely to get prosecuted till the day you do it to the wrong company...
Just remember what? Unless he claims to be somebody else he is hardly committing any fraud. If they don't remember him or if their system doesn't remember him - isn't that their own problem?
But the steps people take to get a discount... He could probably just straihgt ask for a discount and get it anyway without making a new registration.
ANyone minding will not tell you they actually mind....
Case in point. ChatGPT will not accept any masked email from fastmail.
I tried multiple traditional domains. No luck. The error was something to the effect "try later, too much traffic" something or other. (Hiding behind public perception, slick). This went on for days.
One day, after the 20th try...on the next second, I finally relented and used my google workplace email... (which ironically enough is not very liked , particularly by banks, since its not a traditional dot com domain). That worked immediately.
yes, this is the reason to use email on your own domain, it doesn't matter if a company sells the email address, you just spambox all the email to that address after cancelling or whatever.
everyone is hip to the dot separation and + of google et al. it does nothing. good luck getting me to look at genewitch@mydomain emails, since i have used that exactly zero times.
Check out Privacy.com, they let you make virtual cards that you can limit or cancel whenever if things get fishy. I had to use this recently with a merchant who, after being unable to sell from their e-store on weekends left me wondering if I was going to be charged for this unprocessed order or not. The person I spoke to at the business had a 'gotcha' flair to their response about this, so I just cancelled the number before the conversation was over.
Many institutions allow you to issue yourself a digital card via your online banking/mobile app. You can turn it off whenever you want. I have digital cards for all my subscriptions in the event I have the problem you had. The digital cards all tie back to your physical one, but it allows you to give a different card number to the vendor that is not your actual plastic card number.
Pro tip: You can add a `+anything` to your gmail address, and it will still be sent to you (so e.g. `foo.bar+wsj@gmail.com`, when your email address is `foo.bar@gmail.com`). Most websites don't know this and treat it as a different email address, too, if you ever need to sign up twice.
GMail may understand this (it is a standard, I believe) but many sites reject a "+" in an email address.
My ISP is panix.com, which allows me an unlimited number of addresses like "STORENAME@myemail.users.panix.com". This is almost always accepted by websites, works just like the "+" version, and only once has anyone ever been surprised by it. ("Is this a joke???" "No, etc.")
You can also use `.`s arbitrarily, so your 'foo.bar@gmail.com` is 'really' (you might say) `foobar@gmail.com` but also equivalently `f.o.o.b.a.r@gmail.com` and whatever else.
Yes I believe so, which is the domain I used in examples and that the comment I replied to was about? While `+anything` is per RFC, it's not widely implemented either.
I understand that reminding people of dormant subscriptions might prompt cancellations, but I'd think the following test might be worth trying.
Randomly give existing customers free periods or extend a subscription by a certain amount (week/month?), then notify them.
I'm sick/tired of cancelling something only to be told I can get a 'special discount' to stay or come back. It borders on insulting.
I've had multiple monthly services for years that never once extended or lowered my fee. That's fine, that's business. When I went to cancel some to switch (or just cancel), suddenly I can get an extra 50% off what I've been paying patiently for years? Just rubs me the wrong way. It's a game I don't really want to play.
Give me a good rate for the service. Surprise random 'gifts' of a free month of a service or whatnot now and then would be really nice. But it might remind me I'm paying for something I forgot about, and prompt a cancellation. I dunno.
Progressively cheaper subscriptions to reward loyal customers would be great. Like a $10 per month subscription becomes $9 per month after a year and $8 per month after 3 years - as an example (ignoring inflation etc).
I toyed a bit with this idea when I was working with subscriptions, but there are no systems that accommodate for this unless you make your own.
Like the JetBrains model. $99 first year, then $79 second year, then $59/year going forward. No doubt some companies offer discounted-for-loyalty pricing, but yeah, never seen it addressed in billing systems I've seen. You'd likely just move someone to a new subscription ID, and there's likely some gotchas to deal with, but obviously it can be done :)
It's an interesting strategy. There is an element of FOMO if one cancels, but I don't personally know a single developer who wants to cancel their JetBrains license anyways.
I fully agree. I am much more inclined to stay with services that give me free upgrades, even if I don't use the gifts (as long as I am mildly interested in still using the service). And I know nothing is free, but it's pretty cheap to give someone a free week or month of a digital subscription.
Not the exact same example as the "randomly give upgrades", but mintmobile just upped our plan a bit. I realize they did this across the board, but they did also ping us to let us know that a) we're getting upgraded data, b) it's not a one-off thing, and c) we're getting the same deal as new users.
Often when you see upped/higher data rates, it's "new customers only". This wasn't one of those cases.
Recently switched car insurance. I check every so often. Never bothered when the delta was $15/$20 over a 6 month period. Last week, there was a $200 delta, with better rate for lower deductibles. I bought new policy, went to cancel old one. Took 10 minutes of friendly text chat to keep saying "no, just cancel". At one point, the agent said "is there any possible thing I can do to keep you?". I said "no", then it went faster after that, but they'd tried "let me look for better rates" angle. WTF? You have some internal "better rates" that you don't give me up front? Makes me not want to go back in future.
> WTF? You have some internal "better rates" that you don't give me up front?
They might have complicated contracts with re-sellers that prohibits them from advertising the cheaper rate. That's why you should always ask for a discount with every purchase.
I am reluctant to subscribe to anything nowadays. I contemplate hard and long before deciding to go ahead, more likely not going ahead. And this is mostly due to the rubbish client relationships many providers allow for themselves. Most times it does not worth the effort.
The pain I went through to stop The Economist has made me reluctant to subscribe to anything too - and I run a subscription publication business. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that this approach hurts revenue overall.
Oh! I thought about re-subscribing to The Economist. I was subscriber several years ago. I like their content and buy the paper version occasionally. You made me think again.
And yes, unluckily those toxic 1/3 being hostile to subscribers hurt everyone else. : (
I've had good luck subscribing through third party resellers. I can set the subscription to auto-renew at the same price I had the year before or If I want to cancel, I notify them and they do the cancellation for me. Currently, I have my Economist subscription through https://www.discountmags.com. It's cheaper than the Economist site and easier to manage. There was about a 4 week delay in starting my subscription though, so that's one drawback.
It's tough because everything is a subscription now. In the early days of steaming products like Netflix was great because you had access to so much for a small price. Now subscriptions services are so granular so you really have to pick and choose.
And because it's so easy for everything to be a subscription now, most of them are of negative value to the subscriber. That is, the subscriber gets nothing useful from the email subscription and has to deal with the useless emails taking up decision space (do I delete it now? what if there is something valuable inside? maybe I save it for someday because I might use that coupon?) when they come in.
I wonder if as the subscription landscape gets more “toxic”, it’s a net negative for the whole industry. Even above-board offerings will get ignored by would-be customers that no longer trust.
For sure. I don't want to "subscribe for offers and new products" even if I like the company because I already get too much clutter and I expect that I will ignore/delete 9/10 of their emails.
A thoughtful article, not run of the mill kvetching.
It includes comments from some of the newspapers about the thinking behind their cancellation processes and some considerations of the reasoning, which, regardless whether I agree, is enlightening.
As a side note, there’s hardly any outrage, which I find somehow refreshing reading an article on this or any other topic.
Some years ago, I was subscribed for The Economist. You needed to call support in order to cancel. Every 3 months I'd do the same ritual: call support; tell them I want to cancel; they offer 50% discount for 3 months sub; I tell them I've reconsidered. Every. Goddamn. Three. Months. And what about all the people who don't know about this? Why can't magazines treat their subscribers... you know... fairly?! Why do I have to be a terrible human being and lie my lay to the actual price?
That changed. It is now possible to unsubscribe through the website (or at least, there is a gui to do that). I did that, but my subscription is active until next January, so we'll see.
Last year, I asked their support to unsubscribe me and rejected all the 50% discount offers. They said, 'sure, bro', and, needless to say, early this year I was hit by a (50% discounted) bill for a yearly subscription.
It's worth pointing out that for this issue in particular (unsubscribing online), different customers may get different experiences, even if they went to unsubscribe at the same time. Some states (notably California, but I believe there are a couple more) have passed legislation in the last few years that requires sellers of subscriptions to make it as easy to cancel as it is to sign up in the first place. NYT was, at least for a while, looking at your billing address to decide whether they'd let you unsubscribe online or not.
An economist would say this is price discrimination, similar to coupons. If you're too busy to hassle with cutting out coupons, you pay regular price. If you really want to pay less, you can save with coupons.
This sounds like roughly what I've been through with Comcast for the last decade, calling every year so they give a not-outrageous price. But quarterly calls does seem a bit more extreme!
I started to subscribe to The Economist online and when I got to the payment info thought to check how hard it would be to cancel, and it turns out there's no online way to cancel, you have to talk to customer service rep. I read a number of reports about the process and some were absolutely livid about getting the runaround trying to cancel.
I contacted support to check if this had changed and not only did they confirm that there is no way to cancel online, I was told that this is actually for my benefit! This was conveyed with a lot of corporate-speak trying rationalize the decision (or just confuse me).
An organization being greedy is one thing, but I really don't appreciate being gaslit about it. It's too bad because I like their work, but I won't support these kinds of business practices.
Canceling The Economist was the worst experience of any periodical, by far. You were right not to continue.
Recently canceled and (from transcript) it took 18+ minutes chatting with an online rep. They made sure I knew all the various benefits (newsletters, podcasts, etc), offered me multiple price discounts, and insisted that I try a slimmed down experience ("Espresso") for a month before truly canceling. I'll never consider re-subscribing.
i think i would tell my credit card company that they refused to stop charging me so both they can stop the charges passive aggressively and they get a bad rep with payment processors
This crap is what prevents me from subscribing US press. I would love to some of their titles but I am a foreigner and there's no way I am going to call a number in US to cancel.
I am also not desperated to create burner cards for paying for those.
This crap hurts an awful lot of good actors. I used to work for a small startup in the education sector. We offered trial subscriptions, but because of the 'cancel before your trial expires' anti-pattern that so many companies adopt, potential customers were suspicious. To the extent that they thought they might be charged on trial expiry, despite the fact that they didn't even provide a means of payment at any time during the process.
I'm also in the edtech sector, and we purposely offer our free trial without requiring an email or credit card, for this reason. This limits our ability to ensure that each person only does one trial though; for years, anyone could get unlimited free trials by uninstalling/reinstalliing. But it was better than the alternative, which you note!
The issue with burner cards is that if you do not actually cancel the subscription and just fail to pay, I think can be liable for payment delinquency and accumulate charges and possibly interest.
I used a burner for Financial Times and they were pretty clear that my subscription was active but pending payment. I still did not have access to the articles while in that status. They eventually cancel the subscription though. The reason I did not actually cancel was that the cancel page failed with an error.
Would you like to use an aggregator service which gives you credits? You can use those credits to 'buy' an article from any paid news sites. Maybe a browser addon which activates articles you want to read.
It's interesting how these companies seem to optimize for retention by making it hard to unsubscribe but that's probably not optimal for acquiring customers.
I would probably subscribe to the nytimes but I've been discouraged by the stories of how hard it is to cancel.
Which tells you how much any statement about caring for their customers is an outright lie. If they'll happily inconvenience you because the law doesn't specifically say they shouldn't, then they aren't being a good company but just a minimally compliant one.
What I learned a while ago was that both NYT and Economist will never get another dime from me, because both made me angry when I tried to unsubscribe. As a side effect, I'm far more suspicious of subscriptions now and especially suspicious of newspaper subscriptions, so my default answer is just 'no.' And certainly not until I can prove that the cancellation is just as easy as the initial subscription.
Every year in December I start seeing these nice ads from Economist, FT, NYT and all others and I'm really tempted to subscribe to one of them. But then I go to Reddit and look up reviews about unsubscribing, and see things like "simply call some international USA phone number, wasting a lot of money in the process and when/if you'll get to a human on the other end just dictate them an obscure number not visible anywhere except during the new subscription process" and I nope the fuck out of this idea. The Economist alone lost probably a thousand dollars from me only, which I would have wasted in a recurring sub, like I already do with video streaming services or MMOs. If only they had a sane unsubscribe option online. And the longer I avoid expensive online press, the more I will probably avoid it altogether, since now I know that I'm really not missing much in the very long run, over several years.
Boston Globe forced you to call a boiler room call center as recently as 2021 (when I cancelled) where you had to talk with harried, demoralized staff hurriedly reading through retention scripts. Glad to see they’ve done away with it. NYT still does it, though.
I canceled before they rolled out the online cancellation. I had subscribed early during the pandemic to try and have something high quality and local to follow. The online version of the paper is a lot worse than the old paper version was years ago when I got it. Lots of clickbait articles and articles intended to rile up online subscribers and drive engagement in the comments.
When I went to cancel the process was absolutely horrific. And it also revealed just how scammy the pricing is. The globe would be happy to let you have a subscription for $1 a month. But if you just go in and subscribe they will charge you 10x, 20x, or 30x that amount. You only get access to the cheaper prices once you tried to cancel and had to fight it out with the representatives on the phone. It sounds like the new online cancellation process is something everyone should do to lower their prices even if they don't intend to cancel. If you just sign up they might charge you $30/month, but as soon as you try to cancel they'll give you a way better deal.
This is not a complete solution because you might not remember about the subscription. The list of subscriptions should be displayed on bank's website and there should be a button for unsubscribing.
You really don't need to read more than 1-2 newspapers. They all publish the same stories about the same topics, rarely anything different. To reduce time wasted just summarize their content with an ai bot of your choice. Happy life.
I had the same thought, but the article is about how he was given the job of unsubscribing from 22 newspapers that his employer had been subscribed to.
> In March, the Federal Trade Commission proposed a “click to cancel” rule that would make it as easy for consumers to cancel a subscription as it is to sign up.
Unsubscribing (and cancelling any other recurrent payments) should be made from bank's website. It is noteworthy that banks allow companies to charge you but do not display list of subscriptions and do not allow to easily cancel them. There is no hope that banks will change, so I hope cryptocurrency wallets will fix this problem.
PayPal is a great go-between for this sort of thing. They track your recurring payments and allow you to cancel them in the dashboard. It's the best thing since sliced bread.
It resonates with my own experience. It seems rather counterintuitive that, in an era of growing digitalization and consumer-centric services, some newspapers continue to employ tactics that hinder the cancellation process.
I believe this issue stems from the broader challenges that the print media industry faces, as they grapple with declining circulation and ad revenue. While it's understandable that newspapers would want to retain subscribers, making the cancellation process a nightmare only tarnishes their reputation and, in the long run, may result in even more subscribers seeking alternative sources of information.
A better approach would be for newspapers to invest in improving their digital offerings, making the subscription process more flexible, and providing subscribers with value-added services. This could include offering customized news feeds, interactive multimedia content, and easy access to archival materials. By focusing on the needs of subscribers and creating a seamless user experience, newspapers would be better positioned to maintain their relevance and grow their subscriber base.
It's high time that newspapers prioritize customer satisfaction and transparency. A frustrating cancellation process does nothing but alienate subscribers and contribute to the decline of the print media industry.
> ... invest in improving their digital offerings ... providing subscribers with value-added services ... customized news feeds, interactive multimedia content, and easy access to archival materials.
These things are costs and antithetical to maximizing shareholder value (in the short term) and increasing executive bonuses.
> I believe this issue stems from the broader challenges that the print media industry faces, as they grapple with declining circulation and ad revenue.
If the industry is in its death spiral, it makes sense to hold on to subscribers with reputation destroying practices for as long as possible.
Are there any banks that offer subscription cancellation natively?
I feel like it's a feature that could live at that level rather than deal with these patterns. Within the bank's app, a list of recurring payments or 'subscriptions' with a cancel button. Cancelling results in a failed payment authorization response to the merchant psp the next time they hit you for $, who can then treat it as a cancellation.
There are services like privacy.com like that have fine grained controls like this.
One thing to remember though is that not paying is not the same as not owing. Most online services will do you the favor of cancelling if you don't pay, but there are definitely businesses that will keep your service going, and refer you to collections.
PayPal. Well, sorta. You can revoke authorization for a subscription, you can't actually cancel. Some (most?) companies will auto cancel you if they can't bill you.
To me this is the true value of Apple Pay as a customer. I have all my subscriptions in one place, which says exactly when they expire, and they can all be canceled or resumed with one tap. Sorry to the providers that they have to pay Apple their 30% cut or whatever, but it's the only way to fight back against the "hope you'll forget to cancel" model.
Because they don't have a lot of competition. They publish a very specific type of journalism for a very specific audience. Why shouldn't they fuck you? What are you gonna do about it? Quit doing business with Bloomberg?
This is really what a lot of bad customer service issues boil down to, telecom is a classic example (I'm looking at you Comcast). There has been a lot of consolidation in American media in recent years and it doesn't really take a formal cartel, it just takes these guys at the executive layer looking at their competitor who is not much different, looking at their giant cash hoards, maybe buying each other a few nice dinners in New York City, and shrugging their shoulders as they light up another Cuban.
When it's having a populist moment the political class especially in the EU will take the issue du jour and talk about crafting a law to deal with it. But in a lot of cases we would be better off if they just enforced antitrust laws that are already on the books and got more zealous about that topic in general.
I have one firm rule these days. No rent seeking behaviors. This avoids talking to phone centers in India or some other foreign country, where the person on the other end of the phone barely speaks English to try to get the service cancelled or to fight aggressive billing.
Posted in the wrong thread? I just read the touchscreen thread and then came here and saw this ... found it quite amusing since for a moment I was transported back to the other thread.
Another option would be to mail a physical letter to their billing department stating that you are cancelling your subscription 30 days from now and any subsequent charges to the credit card will be disputed.
... the post office, and most large grocery stores.
I live in the middle of nowhere (population around 200) and i can buy stamps with a 10 minute walk; envelopes, labels, boxes, etc as well. And if that post office is closed, there's another one 10 minutes up the road, and if that one is out, i can drive a triangle to get to another one in about 10 minutes.
Larger cities may require more time to get to a post office, but there's probably 5 places between you and the post office that also sell stamps and envelopes.
I used to subscribe to the Boston Globe and it was torturous to cancel, I’m glad they made it easier now. They charge almost $30 a month for the subscription full price but you can always negotiate it down to like five dollars for 3 to 6 months. The game is stupid, I’d gladly pay them 100 bucks a year for the next few decades of my life without messing around with this fake try to cancel and get a discount thing. It’s so shady.
So I subscribe to the Washington post instead who do offer exactly that kind of subscription.
It's something that's always struck me as prime ground for regulation when the contentious topic of Apple's control over their platform comes up. One of the most often repeated points from Apple customers is the ease of use and trust they have in Apple's payment and cancellation system that all apps are forced to go through and how much they'd hate to lose it.
There is an obvious failure here, we shouldn't rely on companies to force other companies to undertake obviously good, pro-consumer behaviour.
> I was pleasantly surprised to find that about two-thirds of the newspapers on my list were easy or moderately easy to cancel
I was surprised by only ⅓ making things difficult until the rest of the sentence…
> requiring fewer than five minutes to discontinue and presenting few, if any, obstacles
Considering you can sign-up in a minute (except typing in CC details if you aren't using a stored payment method stored in your browser or a service like PayPal) I would class anything close to five minutes rather excessive, and I'd be less forgiving of any obstacles (an “are you sure, we can offer you a discount” I might accept, but not multiple nags or properly dark patterns).
I'd like to see a breakdown where easy and moderately easy are split. I know five minutes is hardly excessive, but being able to sign-up a couple of times faster that cancel I find irritating.
> As a valued subscriber…
That annoys me, perhaps overly I must admit, as much as “we value your privacy” and “your exclusive code”. Attempting to butter me up with a lie just makes them look scammy IMO. I know I'm no more valued than someone who signed up yesterday and someone who subscribed a while before me is no more valued either, just like I know that while the code is indeed unique (as everyone got a different random one) the pretence that I'm somehow getting special treatment when in fact everyone has been sent a code, again, feels scammy.
> phone calls with customer service representatives
I had this one when unsubscribing from New Scientist, a publication that at the time I felt was more reputable than to be deliberately inconvenient (I say “at the time” as they are now owned by the same parent company as the Daily Mail so these days I'd expect bad behaviour!). Signed up with a simple web form years before, had to cancel on the phone. In fairness the call was fairly short, lacking in hard-sell (there was an offer of a few months discounted IIRC), and I wasn't on hold for too long, so it could have been much worse. One mild concern was that I didn't get any confirmation by email/other so if they somehow kept taking money I had no evidence that I'd cancelled – but I made sure to cancel payments from my side to stop that from happening.
I've had the habit of only ever subscribing to news outlets if they allow me the option of paying via PayPal.
If the cancellation process is a deep hole of dark patterns and anti consumerist behaviour then at least I can simply go and delete the token inside PayPals management portal.
Though due to this kind of annoying behaviour, I've become jaded and have given up on subscribing to news outlets all together.
It is well-understood that attempting to stop service from someone like my very large ISP is a nightmare of retention hoops to jump through. It's like in Islam, the man has to repeat three times "I divorce you" to prove that he really, really, really means it. Imagine what the Islamic Marriage Retention Office is like.
But it's also true that the self-same ISP often has many discounts and offers available, and it turns out that they are there for the picking, if you only ask for them. So (before I got on a dirt-cheap paid-for ACP plan) the routine would be to call in, grope around for discounts or offers that could be applied, and then set a reminder for the expiration of that discount so that you could call back in and do the same dance with them.
With many products and services, it really is folly to pay full price. I don't know how many times I've regretted bypassing the little box that says "enter discount code here" because I didn't have one in hand. Often times, if you are shopping in a web store, they'll flash a banner with a code, and you want to write that code down because, chances are, they won't remind you when time comes to check out.
I have slightly similar example with subscribing to mail letters. I did it when I was young because they say that young programmers are better to be involved in mail discussion but I have never read it. Now my mail has more than million letters which I can not even delete because this is just letters from some dudes which are not tied by anything I can select them all and now my email is 99% full.
This the same pattern as retail stores making it hard or easy to return a purchased item. If the return process is simple and straight-forward for the customer, they will not hesitate making future purchase decisions even if there is some uncertainty. I know there is some pain involved for the retailer, but it should part of the cost of doing business.
Various credit cards give you the ability to create per-store cards that can be shut-off or have shutoff dates. When I sign up for a trial now, I use a temporary card that is locked before the payment kicks in.
My card actually has a nice browser extension that automatically gets or generates a per-store card when I hit a payment form. Very convenient.
It does. I've used it myself, but I'm mainly talking about that functionality being the default on all credit cards. I can protect myself from sketchy unsubscribe roadblocks, but the fact that you have to go out of your way to set up Privacy.com means the business practice will persist.
>[...]delivery service issue, [...] confusion about billing
Are these really the two big reasons people cancel?
I cancel because the subscription is too expensive for what they offer, be it the quality slid or the content focus changed too much from the original. It is a cost to benefit analysis in my mind.
Some 'neobanks' like Revolut help deal with this type of thing - you can create a temporary card to sign up and scramble it whenever you please. Great for trials or indeed annoying subscriptions.
I use privacy.com cards with a non existent street address. When I want to cancel and the website doesn't allow/help, I just pause the card. They don't get anything.
For this reason I use a virtual debit card for each subscription and only use it for that. If a subscription is hard to cancel I will just cancel my card instead.
you reminded me i had to cancel mine, and it took 5 minutes. They did offer "streaming only" for $4 a month, but i've had that on my phones for years and used it no times, so i said "i don't use it".
i got an $8 refund and a confirmation number, and that was it.
Most likely that this would make a fine article. No doubt those subscriptions were paid for on an expense account or company card, and the time subscribing and unsubscribing being company time too.
It doesn't make the article any less valid that most people wouldn't have that many subscriptions to care about.
> So, when I was asked earlier this year to unsubscribe The Lenfest Institute from 22 digital newspaper subscriptions left over from a past project, I was prepared to face confusing subscriber portals, unhelpful phone calls with customer service representatives, and worse.
When you make the cancellation process smooth and friendly, if that customer is reconsidering at a later date, they will remember that their last interaction with you was a pleasent one.
If it's hard to unsubscribe - then their last memory is a bad one, and it's even harder to persuade that person to resubsubscribe again.
This is admitedly more applicable to industries with a lot of annual churn between suppliers - such as insurance, internet providers, power suppliers etc -- but it should be a rule of thumb for all companies.