Bad and unethical company website user experiences: Amazon Prime Video cancellation journey

Amazon Prime Video

User experience: you can use it for good or you can use it for evil.

You can use it to “accidentally” keep billing your customers.

Here is my frustrating experience of trying to unsubscribe from Amazon Prime, which I thought I had already done a couple of months ago, but it keeps popping up on my credit card.

This time I am going to document the experience, because I feel like I am going crazy. And as someone who advocates for good, ethical customer and user experience, I feel like this needs to be called out.

The start: You login to Amazon.com, go to the menu, go the most obvious subscriptions and it says you don’t have any.

Then after some Googling I follow this instructions of a video which tells me to go to Your Account > Amazon Prime. (Note: this is already a bad user experience, there is no way I should have to Google instructions to find my way around a website).

You can only get here from a hover + click (on desktop anyway), which is NOT intuitive.

A topic for another time: why I don’t like hover + clicks and how removing the hover can improve your conversion rates. Incidentally hover + clicks are very common on menus.

Even though my credit card statement says “Amazon Prime”, there was still no subscription listed here.

I nearly gave up here and didn’t take a screenshot but I went back on the original subscriptions page earlier, under the “no subscriptions found” text, there was buttons to mutiple possible other subscriptions that you might be looking for.

One of the buttons said Amazone Prime Video and clicking on that took me to a whole different website and login.

That one extra word, video, seemed to be a completely different service with completely different billing.

Talk about confusing!

Finally found the button. Thank you Amazon (sarcastic!)

On no wait, it takes me to a screen with no obvious option to cancel and I have to click on the tiny writing.

This then takes me to a button on a drop-down.

This next page tries to stop me cancelling again and goes back to talking about “Amazon Prime” and other benefits such as “delivery” with no mention of the word “Video”. No wonder I’m so confused as to what service I’m actually subscribed too and how to find it and cancel it.

I Continue to Cancel… (3rd button on right, because putting it first would be too easy, right? Sarcastic!).

They keep switching between the terminology “Cancel” and “End Membership” which is not consistent and adds to the confusion.

I hit the End Membership button.

Again, here the wording is all about Amazon Prime and no mention of the word Video.

I am no longer a “Prime member”. Let’s see if it sticks this time. Again, no mention or sign of the word Video!

I seem to have gone to Amazon.com.au now, maybe this was where I needed to go all along, but how am I supposed to know this?

Not to mention, I thought I already unsubcribed from this service and whatever I did didn’t work properly so this is the second time of me going down this rabbit-hole.

I decided to record it this time, so that if it doesn’t work again I will feel less crazy!

This whole experience might meet the Amazon KPIs of keeping customers subscribed for longer but it errodes brand sentiment and makes customers resent you.

Does your company exist for good or evil!? This whole experience makes me not trust Amazon as a company, and if they’re not trustworthy in this area, what other areas are they not trustworthy in?

It’s not worth short-changing customers in the short-term. They will short-change you in the long term if they can. And the harder you make them work the more motivated they will be to boycott you.