Prime: Amazon should deliberately make terminations more difficult

Amazon is deliberately making it more difficult for customers to cancel their Prime membership. This is reported by Business Insider, citing internal documents. The criticism initially refers to the US market and not to Amazon.de. The project is codenamed Illiad.

Illiad leads to 17 percent fewer terminations

In fact, Amazon is said to have achieved a 14 percent drop in Prime cancellations in 2017 after the launch of Illiad; this should be evident from the internal documents. Essentially, this concept was based on the fact that Amazon Prime customers willing to cancel are overwhelmed with a flood of counter-questions and new offers in the multi-stage cancellation process in order to finally dissuade them from canceling their Prime membership. Due to the many “attempts to distract”, 14 percent fewer Prime users quit than was the case before Illiad was launched.

complaints

Multiple complaints have been filed with the US regulator, the Federal Trade Commission, against Amazon’s subtle attempts to make it more difficult to terminate Prime accounts. One allegation is that Amazon would manipulate Prime customers with special formulations and a special design so that they would ultimately refrain from canceling and stay with Prime.

Amazon denies

An Amazon spokesman contradicted Businessinsider: Both the registration and the deregistration of Amazon Prime are “simple and transparent and the customers are clearly shown the options and the effects of these options”. But Businessinsider shows here at the end of his article how cumbersome the cancellation on Amazon.com is. In the German Amazon app, too, you have to fight your way through a few pages and past a lot of advertising before you can finally cancel the Prime membership.

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