I do still end up ordering from time to time, and the checkout process for non-Prime members is horrific. Multiple Prime sign-up offers that I always need to carefully read so I don’t click the wrong thing, illogical default shipping options, with more tricks to try and get the user to sign up for Prime while choosing shipping, after having already declined multiple times.
I don’t know why any non-Prime customer would want to sign up for Prime after such a user-hostile experience full of dark patterns.
I graphed out my orders since the start of my Amazon account. There was a steady uptrend over 20 years, with yearly growth since 2018. All of that ended 2023. My orders fell off a cliff, dropping by 60% in 2024. The treatment of non-Prime customers isn’t winning me back, it’s pushing me further away. I think my goal for 2026 will be not to order anything from Amazon. It’s been such a bad experience. Apparently their goal of being the world’s most customer-centric company only applies to Prime users.
I hope this judgement will get them to change their ways, but I’m assuming they will do as little as possible to comply, and still pushing Prime hard.
Now it's as slow as "free" delivery, by a random contractor who does God knows what to the package, and prices aren't even better than Walmart or Target on many things.
The "avoid subscribing to prime" shuffle you have to do to even order anything anymore drives me away too, I only use Amazon if it's more than 5% cheaper.
When I order without Prime, it seems my order just sits for a few days, then it hits my credit card and I get it 2 days later. Almost like giving everyone free 2 day shipping wouldn’t cost them anything at this point, so they just artificially delay normal users to make the service worse.
Occasionally the order will trigger right away and I’ve gotten non-Prime stuff in 1 day with free super saver shipping.
* Sometimes I want my order on my Prime day, but they insist on delivering it to me 3 hours from when I ordered it.
* When my son got COVID, we ran around town looking for COVID tests. Target was out of them entirely. So I ordered them on Prime and they showed up later that day. A bunch of them. And 3x cheaper than the COVID+FLU tests I found at CVS later that day.
* Yeah, ads on Prime suck. But I'm rewatching a 90s show and ponied up $3/mo for no ads.
Screw Jeff Bezos, but then again.. I got COVID tests when I needed them.
Amazon delivery in LA is incredibly fast, frequently it says "will be delivered by 4am"
I hate Amazon, not encouraging anyone, but LA is a special zone.
apart from the free shipping aspect, do they actually delay shipping non prime orders if you live in a metro area? The whole FedEx business model originally was not "you pay extra for overnight" (which you would) but actually "because we deliver everything overnight, we don't need warehouses and all our rolling stock is empty every day, so it's cheaper for us"
At least for me, it's easy -- the Prime credit card, which has no extra fee beyond Prime itself. I get 5-7% back, instead of the 1-2% with my other credit cards. It literally pays for itself and more over the course of a year. The faster shipping is just a bonus.
And I'm not buying junk I don't need either. It's literally just regular toiletries, my normal grocery shopping at Whole Foods (also 5% off), and then just replacing all the things in my home when they wear out or break -- kitchen things, bedding, electronics, and so forth. All things that are usually cheaper on Amazon than anywhere else anyways. (I still use Target.com for things that are cheaper there.)
You still get 3% back on that card without prime on amazon fwiw.
Walmart pickup is great.
I live 15 minutes away from the nearest wal-mart and frozens/refrigerables are my biggest concern.
In the meantime I was fed up with Prime Video and wondering why I was paying for it.
Between the dark patterns cancelling Prime and the many dark patterns trying to get you to join Prime I also stopped feeling like a welcome customer of large sections of Amazon's website and have gone even more back to boring old retail stores. My biggest remaining relationship with Amazon is because of the kindle, but their worsening DRM decisions do keep me wondering if I need to explore another ecosystem despite kindle's hardware advantages (including the possibly sunk cost that I invested in too much kindle hardware).
When you get a free (or cheaper than you're currently paying for shipping) Prime offer, you can accept it and then the second the order has gone through go into your account and cancel it and still get the remaining number of promotional days, as well as the benefits for the current order. It's a slightly annoying step, but I figure if they're going to be dumb enough to keep offering me free promotions I might as well take advantage of it.
The main problem is that unless it's a specific brand store, with products sold and shipped by Amazon, all the other products are pure junk. I can easily find them on AliExpress with much lower prices.
This has been my position for upwards of 5 years. Between the quality / UX / social issues - well frankly I'd rather spend money elsewhere (although not at all is likely)
I'd hope that they fixed this. If an account is locked, it seems like it would be common sense to place a hold on any subscriptions associated with it.
The problem with this is you can deny someone's service very easily just by knowing publicly associated data (e.g. email address) and intentionally getting the password wrong a few times.
> So, while being locked out of my account, I couldn't cancel my subscription to Kindle (lost all of the books, too). I just kept getting charged month after month (of which I'd just forget about it after getting angry for a minute).
Most places have some law where you must be able to cancel by calling or some other path. But as a last line stop gap, you can contact your credit card company and deny the charges based on the inability to cancel.
In fact, this is one of the explicit value propositions of an intermediary payment company.
I can’t tell if you’re already saying this, but that’s a problem regardless of whether they suspend charges for your subscription at the time you’re locked out. They only need to ensure the suspension can smoothly be undone when you regain access.
It might be tricky if there are services being provided that don’t require you to log in to receive. But in this case it seems pretty clear Prime should not charge you if you also have no way to access it due to them blocking you.
In my personal experience, Amazon has an acceptable customer support when compared to Google, but nobody with that type of scale can even touch Apple's support experience.
When I worked there (more than a decade ago) senior leaders and old-timers were extremely proud of the fact that they did things like sending "your Prime membership will renew in (a month - I think) - be sure to cancel if you don't want it to" emails. This was quite different from typical subscription services providers at the time.
In fact, I had more than one old-timer mention that they would ask employment candidates about the Prime pricing and renewal strategy and that candidates who said something along the lines of "it's best for people to subscribe and then never use it so we make margin on the service revenue" (along the lines of gym business models) would be rejected.
They really wanted people to want to be Prime members (this was even before Bezos' famous "you'd be irresponsible not to be a Prime member" comment...)
If anyone has any recommended alternatives where I can learn Japanese I'm interested. Despite all the crap Duolingo has, it has been very convenient when it comes to spending 30 minutes at the end of the day doing some Japanese lessons.
Is this through their own storefront, or through a mobile storefront (Apple/Google)? While it's bad either way, Apple and Google specific styling around their subscription confirmation prompts, so I hope they haven't circumvented those somehow.
I genuinely can't fathom these numbers. As in: it could be $25B or $250M and it would mean the same to me.
Does this materially impact Amazon?
I'm (really) not a fan of Amazon, but to me that's an existential amount of money. I don't think I've ever worked anywhere where that kind of money wouldn't be a "ok, I guess we're closing down, turn off the lights when you leave" situation, and I've worked at some large companies.
I'm not usually exposed to financials I guess but my burn rate for my last (very small) company was about $4-5M/y roughly. This amount of money would keep us all gainfully employed for about 500 years.
Our local parking authority (meter maids) just paid out a massive settlement (/s): each claimant gets four (4) twenty-five cent (25¢) parking credits (==$1.00), which expire within one month. They also raised parking rates by about that much, per hour.
Winning! /s
Amazon will do an automatic payout to some people for up to $51. No need to claim anything for that. I'm guessing they'll mail checks or prepaid debit cards or something.
Then Amazon will make a website, within 30 days, and post it on their site (and I'm sure news media will also post it) that will be for manual claims. These claims are also for up to $51 and people will have 180 days to manually claim.
After that, if there's still money, then Amazon will repeatedly do more $51 automatic payments to more people until they're out of money (basically more lax automatic qualification of Prime members from June 23, 2019 to June 23, 2025).
Basically ~30 million people get up to $51.
[0] https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/Amazon-ROSCA-Or...
Dont pay people automatically so that the remaining ones who do claim it get paid a lot more than 51$.
In fact, a lottery where only 1% of victims got 5000$ would be even better.
America loves its inequality. Stop making us equally poor and let the lucky few of us get a 1 oz bar of gold!
> Amazon will be required to pay a $1 billion civil penalty, provide $1.5 billion in refunds back to consumers [...]
This should be its own lawsuit.
On both .com and AWS, Amazon is reaching a stage of maturity where they’re running out of new customers. While still a fan of both, they’re both getting annoying as innovation slows and they get more annoying with a focus on doing things to make your use “sticky” vs making you trip over yourself to buy something because it’s great.
Amazon is full of counterfeit or low quality junk that one needs to navigate. AWS is muddling things with far too many random services thrown at the wall vs just being really good at a few core things. In today competitive environment account teams can’t really explain why we should use AWS apart from “we’re AWS” which is again an answer from a company aging into more stagnating maturity.
The fine, while more than a rounding error, is still small. However it will hopefully help cut down on some of Amazon’s more annoying behaviors.
It is and it isn't. The cost of shipping is built into the price of most of the items. You get a good deal if you buy things where pricing is more or less fixed, or if you buy things one at a time, but if you purchase several items at the same time, you can often save money if you purchase from a vendor that has better unit prices and charges shipping, or offers free shipping with a minimum order.
I see this all the time with my hobby purchases. Amazon has everything (mostly), but it's more cost efficient to put together orders of multiple parts at other vendors. Sometimes just one part at another vendor works too, if it fits in an flat envelope and they charge appropriately for envelope shipping.
Really depends on what you buy, but about half the time I buy from a vendor direct I end up regretting it if I’m in a hurry or not 100% certain of the product before ordering.
(This is not to say that they totally don't deserve fines for violating users' trust with user-adversarial design in the first place, just to point out that these dark patterns are mostly mitigable annoyances that they make up for on volume)
It's not a good deal on shipping because shipping can be had for free without Prime for $25 or $35 orders. It's a paid course where they train you to be an impulse buy addict.
I forgot to cancel prime after a free trial - twice! Noticed a few days after they billed my account. Contacted support and they cancelled and refunded me.
Not out of the goodness of their hearts of course - A 14 day right of withdrawal is part of EU consumer rights.
I'm still confused by this part.
I didn't use Prime for a long time. I remember lots of buttons inviting me to sign up, just like YouTube asks me weekly if I want to subscribe to premium.
But I don't remember anything seemingly deceptive, and none of the news articles seem to actually provide any details. So what precisely was deceptive?
And even the cancellation part, it's just two confirmation screens. It doesn't seem bad. It honestly seems about the same as any other website subscription I've ever had. You click to cancel, say yes I really don't want the benefits (this is the only extra step), and then click to confirm the cancellation.
Something similar happens again with the shipping. I only ever buy enough to get free shipping, but it never defaults to that, it tries to trick you by defaulting to paid, and then when you scroll to change your shipping to free, it again makes "join prime" the most default looking option to pick.
I'm pretty sure in the past there was an extra nag somewhere but the above is my most recent experience. Maybe legal but certainly feels like you're dealing with a scammer.
Since I cancelled Prime, I have saved a fortune in addition to my $100. Not just on Amazon, but period. Super convenient and fast resulted in me buying more, now I am just buying much less stuff, make fewer orders less often. even waiting to go to a store I figure out a way to solve a problem without buying anything, and sometimes to need goes away.
I guess I have Trump to thank for it, never would have cancelled Prime if it wasn't for the US boycott.
I had an annual subscription, and the options on that page made it seem like if I were to cancel that I'd actually lose access immediately, forfeiting the remaining value I'd already paid for. That wasn't in fact the case, but clearly it was designed to guide you into using the "Remind Me" button instead, which I imagine is a very leaky bucket—surely many people who fully intended to cancel would wind up missing the notification three days before renewal and get billed for another year.
Additionally, the text of the buttons and lack of explanation of what's going to happen gives that screen some finality: if I click "End my Benefits" does that mean they end immediately with no recourse? The next page actually showed that you could end and get a refund, or end at the end of the already-paid period, but it was obviously designed to make you uncertain.
Source of screenshot: https://ebookfriendly.com/how-successfully-cancel-amazon-pri...
It seems like they've been adjusting some of the language on the screens in the years since, but still in super confusing ways: https://www.reddit.com/r/amazonprime/comments/wdy84t/cancell...
https://i.insider.com/6226b418990863001998d7a9?width=1200&fo...
https://i.insider.com/6226b454dcce010019a7243a?width=1200&fo...
The "no thanks" on the second one does seem particularly egregious. I'm curious if there's a screenshot of the current one you describe.
Upon filing of the complaint, Amazon removed these dark workflows quickly.
https://deadline.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/FTC-Amazon-c...
> Clicking the link did not end Prime membership. Instead, it took the consumer to another page with a heading that read: “End Your Amazon Prime Membership.” The page contained a button labelled “End Your Prime Membership.” Pressing the button did not end Prime Membership.
...
> Once consumers reached the Iliad Flow, they had to proceed through its entirety—spanning three pages, each of which presented consumers several options, beyond the Prime Central page—to cancel Prime.
...
> Also, on page one of the Iliad Flow, Amazon presented consumers with three buttons at the bottom. “Remind Me Later,” the button on the left, sent the consumer a reminder three days before their Prime membership renews ... “Keep My Benefits,” on the right, also took the consumer out of the Iliad Flow without cancelling Prime. Finally, “Continue to Cancel,” in the middle, also did not cancel Prime but instead proceeded to the second page of the Iliad Flow.
> Finally, at the bottom of Iliad Flow page two, Amazon presented consumers with buttons offering the same three options as the first page: “Remind Me Later,” “Continue to Cancel,” and “Keep My Membership” (labelled “Keep My Benefits” on the first page). See Attachment Q, at 4. Once again, consumers could not cancel their Prime subscription on the second page of the Iliad Flow. Choosing either “Remind Me Later” or “Keep My Membership” took the consumer out of the Iliad Flow without cancelling. Consumers had to click “Continue to Cancel” to access the third page of the Iliad Flow.
...
> Therefore, to complete the Iliad Flow and cancel a Prime membership, the consumer needed to click a minimum of six times from Amazon.com: Prime Central -> “Manage Membership” -> “End Membership” -> “Continue to Cancel” -> “Continue to Cancel” -> “End Now.”
Call me a fool, but I fell for this and paid them for several months.
First, I don't think it was just two screens (the article mentions 3).
Second, unless you read really carefully, they made it appear that you had indeed unsubscribed, when you hadn't. I think the messaging was something along the lines of "OK, you have access to it until the end of the month". I was a monthly subscriber, so I took it to mean it would stop at the end of that month. But what they were really saying was something along the lines of "... and maybe you can think about it some more to see if it's worth it for you, and if you still want to cancel, click here". Only it wasn't as obvious as how I wrote it.
> It honestly seems about the same as any other website subscription I've ever had.
Not for me. For all the subscriptions I've canceled, Amazon Prime was the only one I fell for and ended up paying continually. Yes, other sites may have multiple steps, but the verbiage was always much clearer that you still hadn't unsubscribed.
It's really too bad the FTC settled and AMZN gets to admit no fault. What is the incentive for FTC to simply not pursue this to the bitter end? 1B is literally pocket change to the fed government, and is laugh-meme moment for Amazon. $50 back to each user is also not even worth claiming. So the settlement is just FTC not doing their job.
Disclaimer: I willingly use Prime and doubt I'd ever leave.
> and cease unlawful enrollment and cancellation practices for Prime.
which thank god, Amazon deserves to be in the hall of fame for their multiple beg screens.
I subscribe to as many things as I can through Apple because I can instantly unsubscribe without companies wasting my time.
Ex, netflix, which has decided to pop up a 'we noticed there are people who don't live with you using your account, click here to pay us another $9/month' every time it starts on my TV, presumably because my underage child, who legally lives with me, uses it on her phone when she is away at school for 5 months a year.
And then when someone clicked the default pay us button, I was unable to figure out how to remove the charge without actually calling and telling them I was canceling after 20+ years. (the whole extra member thing wasn't showing up in the web ui, no idea why, maybe its because of the TV clicking process).
"Shipping is 2 day." That doesn't mean it will be shipped as to arrive within two days from ordering, but when we ship it (which may be that day, or may be three days later) you'll get it within 2 days...
Edit: A search reveals that this was apparently controversial at the time: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/06/21/biden-infrastructur.... The shamelessness of "Trump-Vance" here funny.
https://www.axios.com/local/washington-dc/2025/09/17/trump-f...
The median US household income is $80k and has a savings rate (profit) of 3.6%, or $2880.
This $2.5B fine is equivalent to the average US household being fined $115 or, basically, a traffic ticket.
As of the time this was written, if you go through the order flow for anything, at any price, the first shipping option will be "get one-day shipping FREE with Amazon Prime", wrapped in a huge CTA. Between that and checkout is a "are you sure?" nag screen where they tell you all of the benefits of going Prime.
I don't shop at Amazon nearly as much as I did in past years, but I was shocked to see how challenging it was to voluntarily pay for one-day shipping because of all of this!
Nah, jk. Of course not.
I found it really easy to cancel. They even refunded me when I canceled my subscription after the free trial expired (forgot to cancel before that despite being notified).
Clicking passed the "look at what you will lose if you cancel" screen is not my idea of "hard".
Yes, they push for subscriptions, usually using promotional offers. It is called marketing, and Amazon is relatively mild in that regard.
Maybe it could create a precedent and make the majority of subscription services pay.
Oh, the fuss is because Amazon is big. The big players receive a lot of scrutiny.
> I found it really easy to cancel.
I find it a lot easier to sign up. I think that's the issue at play here.
But I agree. It's just an extra button you have to press. Annoying, but not the worst thing a company has done to me
Whats the point of fining them? It's not gonna change the system of endless growth for the shareholders, multi million dollar executive salaries for executives who don't know anything about what their business does and have zero forward planning or responsibility.
https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/cases-proceedings/2...
But it's fairly scummy how it doesn't seem to send you any email, the payments have a very vague generic coding like "AMZ2318971239", and the actual subscription management is super buried. I only noticed it, after years of using Amazon a fair bit, when I went deep into my account panes looking for something else.
