Amazon has finally agreed to stop putting obstacles in the way of Internet users who want to terminate Amazon Prime.
Want to leave Prime Video for another SVOD platform? Or do you no longer want to benefit from the advantages associated with Amazon Prime? The process to cancel your subscription will now be much easier and faster. The American company finally resolved to greatly simplify the process, yielding to growing pressure from the European Union on this subject.
Concretely, the new path will be done literally in two clicks, with a clearly visible and unequivocal “cancel” button, indicates a press release shared by Brussels on July 1. The update to the interface allowing you to give up Amazon Prime more quickly has not yet been deployed in France: the old account settings are still offered.
Practices qualified as user traps
The commissioner in charge of justice issues in Brussels, Didier Reynders, welcomed Amazon’s change in approach, which has the effect of putting an end to schemes which had the sole purpose of dissuading Internet users from opt out of their subscription, using fuzzy wording and placing the button behind multiple pages.
The difficulty in stopping an Amazon Prime subscription obviously contrasts with the experience that is offered to subscribe to one. Here, on the contrary, everything is done so that the Internet user activates his package without difficulty. It was disloyal. Didier Reynders also describes this as a “manipulative process” and a “user trap”, which is also known in English as the “dark pattern”.
“It may be convenient for consumers to subscribe to an online service because it is often a very simple process, but the reverse operation, to unsubscribe, should be possible with the same ease. Consumers must be able to exercise their rights without pressure from platforms “, he recalls.
Amazon Prime is an annual subscription plan, billed at 49 euros, which gives access to various services – accelerated delivery, access to a catalog of SVOD videos, a platform for listening to music, access to Twitch as well as to e-books and a storage service to host data, such as photos.
