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Companies Must Let Customers Cancel Subscriptions Online, California Law Says (cnet.com)
A California law that went into effect July 1 is aimed at making it easier for customers to cancel their subscriptions online. From a report: The law states that customers who accept an automatic renewal or continuous service offer online must be able to cancel the service online. That could include a pre-written "termination email" provided by the company that can be sent by the consumer without the need for more information. The law means you won't have to make anymore phone calls to obscure customer service hotlines to cancel services like news subscriptions, music streaming or meal plans, for example. One person tweeted about trying to cancel a New York Times subscription on the phone and being put on hold for 15 minutes -- twice.
It's too difficult to cancel services. Anything that makes it easier is good.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
In the UK, they like to force you to cancel via phone (or other interactive method) so they can push you to their retention department to offer you a deal to stay. Many people take advantage of this to get a better deal - I guess this makes it easier for the people who have decided to definitely leave to get out without jumping thorough the hoops.
I imagine (like many things) we got this from the US - presumably this is how it works in California also?
send a letter (paper mail) to the managing director/CEO at their registered head office; then cancel the continuous-authority/direct-debit with your bank. Most companies hate this as they don't like dealing with paper; however you have given them legal notice. I will do that if they make it hard to cancel, I have better things to do than waste my time trying to talk to someone in a call center.
The Subscription Termination Server is temporarily unavailable to service your request due to capacity problems. Please try again later.
I do like if people are able to do cancelation online if they did the acceptation online as well.
When I look at the example that is given about the 2 times 15 minute calls. I wonder about two things:
1) I never knew that the New Yor Times was based in California.
2) The answer was agiven after the question:
"Please send me your newspaper cancellation horror stories." So that seems a bit biassed, I would say.
And without any extra explanation, we have NO idea why that happened or what number was called. I see cancelation of our services coming in wrong all the time. The best ones are "Hi, I am Don, I would like to stop." No email that is known. No other information and it comes in with a fax without the return number showing.
Then 3 months later we get a complaint from Ronald Somelastname and he is angry we did not cancel the service.
I am all for automated cancelations. Doing retention at that moment is way to late and too much work. People have already made up their mind. Automated cancelation would be so much cheaper. But then I live in a Communist country (Belgium) where customers have some rights, the bastards. Automated cancelation would avoid the 50% or more where it is not (legally) clear what the customer wants exactly. Saying "I am interetsed in canceling" is NOT the sasme as "I am canceling". If you have multiple accounts, which one do you want to cancel? And if you send an email to NoReply@example.com or to SomeRandomAdress@example.com does not mean you did it correctly and your cancelation will be honoured.
But again: automated cancelation if the subscription is done online is a good thing. Should not matter if it is a newsletter or a credit card or whatever.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Where possible I use PayPal as the payment method for an automatic renewal service.
Then I cancel the payment agreement on PayPal, which is very easy to do.
I recently changed jobs, and my previous employer's life insurance company tried to pull a fast one on me.
I did not need to continue the LI policy from the last job, I have one with my new job. the previous one was trying to be 'helpful' by giving me the option to continue it. that's fine, but...
they didn't phrase it that way, and that caused me to waste time with them. they sent me a 'bill' and it was hard to tell it was not a real bill. it looked like they auto-subscribed me to a continued service without my permission. I did not want to deal with a collections agency and all THAT hassle, when I never signed up for such service to begin with.
I called the LI company and asked what this was about. at first, they tried to snow me into believing I had to mail them some kind of letter or fax something to cancel this service. I asked what would happen if I just ignored the 'bill' and they finally admitted that the 'policy' would be void and there would be no charge.
so, why make me mail in some stupid shit and waste time when I could just ignore it and not have to spend time on a thing I never authorized?
reason: they hope to snag enough dumb fish and I bet they do, since they are still in business (and likely they make a lot from false 'renewals').
companies *think* they need to resort to low-handed tactics to be profitable, but its just pure greed. this is not - and should never be - part of a business plan. harassing past customers is not a sound business strat.
they are now on my 'never do business with' list. but I'm just one person, and their behavior will never change.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
I remember back in the days of working for a dial-up ISP, I developed an on-line-cancellation process, to complement the online registration systems.
Go to customer accounts web site.
Pass the usual authentication credentials
Click on cancel service.
Choose which service you want to cancel
Confirm.
If the user is currently connected via that service, disconnect the session immediately, flag the service account closed on the authentication server, remove DNS entries, deny incoming email, remove associated web hosting, get the billing system to record the service closure and associated billing product pro-rated refund calculated, and if it was the last billable service on that account, the refund to go through automatically to their usual payment source.
End-to-end, it would take minutes.
If user is not currently connected via that service, it would require a human to vet authentication, and call them back to confirm.
It was never deployed. DSL came along, and with it supplier contracts with a 12 month mininum contract term per customer line, which made the cancellation process tougher to automate.
While the New York Times does have sections for local New York state and city news it is a nationally distributed newspaper. Since they do business in California they're stuck with California law when dealing with California customers.
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Ahh, yes. The good old "force bill". Basically the card issuers being complicity in fraud. I have a theory that MasterCard and Visa themselves require their licensees to honour force bills.
I had someone sign up for a subscription service with my card (probably skimmed at a hotel). I called, argued with the card issuer for 15 minutes before they reversed the charge and cancelled the card (and issued a new one). That *should* have been the end of it. But then a month later, that same subscription was billed again, and to the *new* card number which I had given to exactly nobody. I called a bitched out the card issuer. They used the "force bill" excuse and tried to insist that I had signed up for the service! I bitched them out some more and they eventually reversed the change and did the cancel/reissue dance again. But then they told me that *I* had to contact this outfit, which I never signed up with in the first place, and have them cancel the charge! That shouldn't be my problem if the card issuer allowed a fraudulent charge, and that's leaving aside the fact that there was no way I'd be able to provide an account number or anything like that so that the merchant doing the charge could even find the fraudulent account. Yet if they had simply blocked everything going to the originally cancelled card number, there would be no problem. (I did, eventually, get it sorted out by calling the merchant. Something I wouldn't have done if it wasn't a reasonably reputable one. But that doesn't change that I shouldn't have had to.)
Why they allow anything on a card number that was cancelled for fraud is beyond me.
If it works in theory, try something else in practice.
The XM contract I was offered made it clear that phone call was the only avenue to cancel. No thanks.
XM doesn't allow cancellation by anything but phone call
https://m.siriusxm.com/pdf/siriusxm_customeragreement_eng.pdf