Make Subscription Cancellations Easier? Bad Idea, Say Media And Marketing Trade Groups

Jul 24, 2023

By Tony Silber

File this one under the tag, “What the Heck?”

Anyone who’s ever tried to cancel a subscription or a membership because they don’t want it or don’t need it anymore knows how difficult and time consuming that can be.

Publishers, advertisers, video-game companies and other merchants like it when people can sign up for things with one simple click on a webpage. But to cancel a subscription and free yourself from automatically recurring payments that often also come with regular price increases, you have to jump through hoops.

You have to log in to an account. Maybe you have to prove you are who you say you are via a code that goes to a second device like your phone or to email. And if you’ve changed email accounts, or phones, good luck with getting into an old, obsolete account. Maybe you need to call someone on the phone to cancel.

It’s time consuming and irritating. So you don’t bother. Now the Federal Trade Commission is proposing a requirement that cancelling be as easy as signing up. It’s a straightforward concept: An end to schemes and mechanisms intended to add barriers to the cancellation process.

Click-to-cancel should be just like click-to-join.

The FTC proposal came in March, and since then, it’s been reviewing responses from stakeholders.

It comes as a surprise, though, that the associations representing publishers and advertisers, among others, have come out in opposition. It’s likewise surprising that the trade groups are also positioning their opposition as a consumer-friendly process. There’s a word for that—something like “chutzpah?”

The challenge, these associations claim, is that consumers might become frustrated by the simple approach. They’ve become used to a protracted process, these groups say. Never mind the frustration and the sometimes deliberately tricky methods. “If sellers are required to enable cancellation through a single click or action by the consumer, accidental cancellations will become much more common, as consumers will not expect to remove their recurring goods or services with just one click,” the Association of National Advertisers said in its comments on the proposal. This debate was reported in the Wall Street Journal earlier this month.

Inadvertent cancellations could cause consumers to miss out on essential items, these groups say. Or maybe they’ll have the hassle of re-registering for a service they didn’t intend to cancel. The trade groups say making a cancellation process a multilayered event—involving logging in with a password, double checking the consumer’s intent (and creating an upsell opportunity, by the way,) protects consumers.

Okay. Yeah, right.