Amazon - deceptive business practice
 

I look on my credit card and find a fee from Amazon for $104. Automatic Prime membership renewal! No email notice that it is coming. And I don't remember ever having agreed to auto renewal. The auto renewal was probably hidden in the fine print nobody reads. What kind of business does this? I called and cancelled my account and got a refund. Never doing business with Amazon again. Amazon is as crooked as Wells Fargo and Santander banks.

I read that fine print on the free trial period, and so didn't sign up on it. I felt it was obvious, and *any* trial period requiring billing info should be a major tip off that there will be some form of charge.

Its nice that they refunded you.

Recently I bought something off eBay but when it arrived it had Amazon receipts and info inside.
No mention of Amazon in the ad & the "store" looked like any other bulk seller on eBay.

Not sure if my experience qualifies as deception but it surprised me to say the least.

A lot of storefronts use Amazon for fulfillment.

I've been a Prime member for years. The aute-renewal was definitely part of the package and not hidden when I signed up. These days lots of businesses use this sort of thing. It's not unusual and I kind of expect it. I've always gotten an email notice, I'm pretty sure. Is it possible that your renewal email got sent to a SPAM folder somewhere that you missed?

Maybe you overpaid for the product on EBay. Check out this story about pricing arbitrage.

When you sign up for Prime or similar services, there is always an automatic renewal. If you didn't know that, then you haven't been paying attention.

Lots of sellers use both ebay and Amazon platforms.

If you sign up for ANYTHING that requires your credit card, you have to assume its auto renewal. Even "free" trials.

I signed up the day of the $67 promo. I am not against auto renewal. But it was not apparent to me this was part of the package. There was no box to check to select whether to opt in or not, which there should have been. During my investigation on my account page I saw you could select to get an email notifying you 3 days before the renewal date. That should have been automatic. And in the same area you could opt out of auto renewal. The younger people may be being successfully indoctrinated to accept others making decisions for them, but not me. And as far as "not paying attention" or reading the fine print - I am guilty. My point is that you should get a choice in such a matter. I see this elsewhere also, and it always seems deceptive to me. I used Amazon for the streaming movies. I have found plenty of "other" places to stream movies, so I don't need them any more.

Just a sidenote, when I started using Prime the promo was 25 Euro. Now it is like 40 or 45 Euro or something.
We use this extensively for streaming movies and music.
(I get an email well before renewal.)

Auto-renew is fairly common business practice. In principle it isn't a bad idea, but the way some outfits implement it is pretty shady. They like to keep it under the radar, and often make you jump through hoops to cancel it. For instance, some companies will demand that you cancel within 3 months or even one month of the renewal date, hoping you'll forget or otherwise miss the window of opportunity. It is unusual for a company not to notify you before auto-renewing.
I use Prime and I think it's a good deal, but yes, Amazon skates on the edge of honest dealing with people. Wait until you try to be a supplier for Amazon. You make the product and Amazon makes the money.

Which is why a pre-loaded gift card would be perfect for this situation.

Except credit card companies make it very difficult to protect oneself:
1). Hefty charge to purchase (10-20%) in store.
2). You still have to provide extensive personally-identifiable information to activate and use your purchase for commerce.
3). These cards are not re-loadable.

I once had a gift card and wanted to buy a couple of cheap DRM-free games from https://www.gog.com/.
The transaction wouldn't process online.
I called the CC company.
They said gog was "in a country on the government terrorist watch list".
It is located in Cyprus and Poland.

That kind of stuff (pricing arbitrage) frosts my nuts. It's just greedy people with no more ambition than to scheme how to make money off of someone else's risk and hard work.
We had a huge problem with eBay about 10 years ago from companies auctioning magazine subscriptions. All they did was get a photo of your magazine cover and auction off subscriptions for it. They were selling $30 magazines subs for $5 and $10 dollars and expecting publishers to honor the sale. I raised hell with eBay, but they said it was between the buyer and the publisher, if the buyer wasn't happy, he wouldn't buy again - capitalism at it's best! Except the seller had the money and the publisher had the disgruntled buyer, not to mention the problems with the post office.
I think they finally changed their policy, but at the time eBay saw nothing wrong with the practice.

WD, so they were selling something they didn't own...using FCC resources...?

I set up ecomm for a P&G division, Downey, Dryel, stuff like that. We were pushing a lot of coupons to increase sales and consumer awareness.

Every once in a while I'd get a call from accounting, they have a refund request, they can see that they shipped to the customer but can't find any record of the customer paying which meant no card info to issue a refund.

Drove me nuts for months. One day I re-sort the database looking for something specific and I see this one customer who has bought hundreds of times. I though that was odd, wondered if he was an institutional buyer because no one needed that much product in a year.

I dig a bit deeper and discover not one order was shipped to him. In fact every single order was shipped to someone else and never the same person twice.

So based off his email address I check his website. He's selling literally hundreds of products, not one that he actually purchased or stocked in advance of selling it.

What he was doing was finding deals, free shipping, direct discounts etc... that resulted in him being able to sell the product cheaper than most other places but still have margin in it for him.

A customer would place an order with him, he'd bang their card then he'd buy the product from the vendor using his CC info but his customers ship to and have the vendor drop ship.

I was pretty pissed but had to applaud him for the shear ****ing brilliance of it.

P&G were really pissed at first till I reminded them that all he had done was take a cut from the customer for himself. P&G lost no money on the deals and he sold hundreds of units for them for the minor inconvenience of the odd return / refund issue which was solved by sending the customer a check.

They grudgingly let it go.

The gog guys are awesome.

I know them personally.

Stand up people.

SM, if gog ever seeks further evidence of business suppression/loss they can contact me.
I took phone notes and should still have them.

Something like this was happening to us. These sellers were selling subscriptions for $5 or $10 and sending a few bucks to us along with the subscriber's name & info. We were fulfilling subscriptions for a fraction of what they cost us to produce. When we complained to eBay they said they wouldn't stop the sellers.
I said, "Wait, you mean I can auction off your car for $100, promise the buyer that you'll deliver it to him in 8 to 12 weeks, and that's fine with eBay?" Their response was they wouldn't interfere with the transactions.

I have noticed some of my recent Amazon purchases are shipped direct from China.