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Amazon's Prime cancellation policy is facing legal challenges in Europe, with the Norwegian Consumer Council (NCC) calling it a 'deliberate attempt to confuse and frustrate customers'.
Prime offers its members streaming movies and TV shows, as well as free shipping for a number of marketplace items.
However, users attempting to unsubscribe from the service, say consumer groups, face complicated navigation menus, skewed wording, confusing choices and repeated nudging.
"Throughout the process, Amazon manipulates users through wording and graphic design, making the process needlessly difficult and frustrating to understand," it says.
In order to end a subscription to Amazon Prime, the customer has to log in to their Amazon account, then open the menu in the corner and click ‘Your Account’, followed by ‘Prime membership’. From this point, though, he or she has to click and scroll through six different pages and select various options, before receiving a final confirmation.
In a survey of 1,000 Norwegian consumers, one in four said they'd had difficulties unsubscribing from digital services. The reasons included time-consuming processes, difficulty in contacting customer services and overly-complicated websites.
The NCC has published a report on its findings, and is challenging Amazon under Norway’s Marketing Control Act, the national implementation of the EU’s Unfair Commercial Practices Directive. It says it's garnered support from 16 different consumer organizations in Europe and the US, which plan to ask their local consumer authorities to investigate the use of dark patterns in their countries.
"It should be as easy to end a subscription as it was to subscribe in the first place. Amazon should facilitate a good user experience instead of hindering customers and tricking them into continuing paid services they do not need or want," says Finn Lützow-Holm Myrstad, director of digital policy at the NCC.
"In our view, this practice not only betrays the expectations and trust of consumers but breaches European law."
Amazon is defending its cancellation process, saying it's easy for customers to quit whenever they choose. However, this isn't the first time the company has come under fire for the way it handles Prime subscriptions, with the UK's Advertising Standards Authority ruling in 2019 that the sign-up process made it too easy to register by mistake.
