Re: Amazon Cancel Prime Video Membership
Cre Tran
Thinking about canceling your Amazon Prime membership? We can't say we blame you: There are plenty of good reasons to stop giving the retail giant your money, whether you're trying to save on subscription fees or align your spending more closely with your values.
Of course, some shoppers use Amazon's 30-day free trial to gain access to Prime Day sales. Those folks will also need to cancel their membership before it's up for renewal to avoid the hefty price tag of a paid plan. Amazon's Prime cancellation process can be convoluted, so here's a step-by-step guide on how to bid Bezos goodbye.
Dylan Haas is a Lead Shopping Reporter for Mashable, where he covers all things gaming, pets, fitness, sleep, and shopping events like Black Friday and Prime Day. Before joining the team at Mashable, Dylan received a B.A. in Communications from Pace University and contributed to publications like Paste Magazine, Bandsintown, and others following a brief stint as a marketing and management assistant in the music industry.
When he's not writing or testing products, you can find Dylan playing lots of video games, working out, spending time with loved ones (especially his dog, Stevie), or watching reality TV. Follow him on X at @iamdylanhaas, or send him an email at [email protected].
Haley received a B.A. in Journalism from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and honed her sifting and winnowing skills at The Daily Cardinal. She previously covered politics for The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, investigated exotic pet ownership for Wisconsin Watch, and blogged for some of your favorite reality stars.
In her free time, Haley enjoys playing video games, drawing, taking walks on Lake Michigan, and spending time with her parrot (Melon) and dog (Pierogi). She really, really wants to get back into horseback riding. You can follow her on X at @haleyhenschel or reach her via email at [email protected].
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST: Amazon is facing a federal lawsuit over Prime memberships. The Federal Trade Commission is accusing the tech giant of tricking people into buying Prime subscriptions and making them purposefully hard to cancel. I want to note Amazon is among NPR's financial supporters, but we cover them like any other company. I will also note NPR's Alina Selyukh is here to tell us more about today's lawsuit. Hey, Alina.ALINA SELYUKH, BYLINE: Hello, hello.KELLY: OK, so what exactly are regulators accusing Amazon of doing?SELYUKH: So they say Amazon for years used, quote, "manipulative, coercive or deceptive tactics," designing its platform to get people to sign up for Prime even if they maybe didn't fully want to. And then these subscriptions would automatically renew costing people $15 a month or $139 a year. And, you know, Prime - it's kind of the heart of Amazon's retail business. Prime members shop more. They spend more. As of two years ago, Amazon had 200 million Prime subscribers globally. And this lawsuit posits some of them maybe were gained in sneaky ways.KELLY: Sneaky ways like what?SELYUKH: So regulators call it dark patterns, which is a dramatic industry term. One example is making it hard to compare your options. So, for example, the FTC says Amazon's website would bombard shoppers with ways to sign up for Prime, but options to shop without Prime would be hard to spot. Or regulators say there would be a button that you have to click to complete a purchase, but it would obscure the fact that clicking it also signs you up for Prime.And I want to mention the other main bit of the FTC's lawsuit. It's about canceling Prime. The agency says Amazon built the cancellation process with a focus on discouraging people from leaving. It's a lot of pages. It's a lot of clicks. Internally, the process was apparently called the Iliad Flow.KELLY: The Iliad Flow - like, Greek epic, Trojan War kind of Iliad Flow?SELYUKH: Yes, exactly.KELLY: OK (laughter).SELYUKH: Hundreds of pages long, which - to the FTC, that makes it clear maybe Amazon wanted cancellations to be quite laborious. The FTC says Amazon began changing some of these things as the federal investigation got underway, but violations continue.KELLY: What is Amazon saying to all of this?SELYUKH: You know, it appears the lawsuit caught Amazon by surprise. In its press statements, the company said it was in talks with FTC staff and expected to meet with the commissioners before the lawsuit landed. And overall, Amazon called FTC's claims, quote, "false on the facts and the law."KELLY: So step back and just answer for me, how big a deal is this case likely to prove to be for Amazon?SELYUKH: Yeah, so this is the first FTC lawsuit against Amazon under the agency's firebrand chair, Lina Khan. She arrived as a young legal star in competition and monopoly, and she's most famous for her law school paper that was called "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox." Because of that, Amazon actually even tried to have Khan recuse herself from FTC cases about the company. Now she's bringing this lawsuit. And also, companies often push to settle regulatory cases. Recently, Amazon itself agreed to pay $30 million to settle alleged privacy violations without admitting wrongdoing. But this case is before a federal court in Seattle now - might become the flashpoint of the FTC's scrutiny of Amazon.KELLY: Thanks, Alina.SELYUKH: Thank you.KELLY: NPR's Alina Selyukh.(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
Allows people who have amazon prime to turn on automatic resub for there free sub they could also have it off so they can sub to differnt people. would be very useful for people who have 1 year amazon prime membership.
Yeah, not gonna happen. Ever. That would be a lot of money out of Amazon's pocket each month. In a week or two, I could get at least 50-70 people who have never used Twitch before to sub to me. This would only benefit me and no one else, especially not Twitch or Amazon. It is a marketing gimmick, nothing more. I would love it because it would literally mean free money for many people, but that is the reason we will never see it.
I am strongly against this.
My reasoning is as follows: The free 1-month subscription any Amazon Prime subscriber is given every month of their Amazon Prime subscription is an expense only proposition. It is a marketing tool that is meant to drive engagement on Twitch. If viewers who are Amazon Prime subscribers can just set and forget their Prime Sub to any streamer, and have mostly no interest in Twitch, the only ones who benefit from this are Affiliate and Partner streamers on Twitch. And the only benefit is a financial one. And worse, there will be no even distribution, with the featured broadcasters on the front page or who already make the most in ad revenue due to their high viewer counts reaping the lions share of it. This already happens with the current system, but them not automatically cancelling and needing to be renewed would amplify the issue, and no longer drive any genuine engagement to Twitch from those who forget in exchange.
Today at the Twitchcon Prime (NA) Patch Notes Live, Mikey Minty and the team kept pushing the use of Amazon Prime and saying how it's good for streamers. If this is to be the case, then it should be an option to allow Prime subs to be automatically renewed.
In this other UV post -subscriptions/suggestions/18419695--would-you-like-to-resubscribe-to-this-broadcaster it has been 'Planned' for resubbing with twitch prime. Having this automatically done, or an option to do it would be a good addition in this area.
How is this still not a thing when this was posted almost 6 years ago!??!? The main issue with prime subs is this ridiculous gap there seems to be between it expiring and renewing. I've noticed that there is about a 5 or so hour gap where you can't use your prime sub after it expires. That incredibly annoying issue could very easily be solved if you guys allowed automatic prime resubs. There is no logical reason we need to manually re-do it each month and there is especially no logical reason for a 5+ hour gap of being unable to use the sub at all. As someone who has been subbed to the same streamer with my prime sub since they were added in 2016, this is getting really really old and only making me want to cancel my prime subscription completely.
This would be great, as the majority of my subs are Prime subs (at the time of this comment). This is convenient for both the streamer and the subscriber. Then if someone wants to change who they use their Prime sub on, they can cancel the reoccurring subscription. This will be great for my iPhone users since there still isn't a way to use Prime Sub in the iOS Twitch app - and it is a pain to try to get it to work via the mobile browser.
It should be made so that people can auto-assign their Prime sub to the same channel each month like you can with auto-renewing regular subs. Right now you have to go and manually resub to the channel each month and sometimes the sub isn't even available as soon as your previous month's Prime sub runs out so you're left without a sub until it becomes available again.
THIS! We get so tired of having to remind our fans to subscribe with Amazon Prime. It hurts our content and it's easily the most-requested feature from our users/viewers/fans. They've been requesting it for years now. It's hard to rely on the revenue generated from Prime Subscriptions when it goes up and down like a Yo Yo every month. This is my biggest request of Twitch and I hope it can become a reality. Thank you.
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