14 day free trial? Cool! Sign me up.
Oh, but I have to give you my payment information? An actual PayPal invoice or my credit card number? For “future” payment?
No way. Give me a free trial without tying a rope around my nuts! I don’t trust you guys with my payment information!
Bastards.
Dude. Welcome to the internet. It’s a scary place!
Aye. Not as safe, and not as fun, as it ought to be.
I was comfortable giving them my email address and my real name. Fair enough. But a hook into my payment methods…before any agreement to purchase has been arrived at? Hey, mail me a blank check: I promise not to abuse the trust!
Heh. Maybe I’ll open a new PayPal account, and keep thirty-two cents in it.
You’re very likely to be too lazy to cancel after the free trial. So they want to have the ability to charge you if that’s the case.
I honestly can’t think of a single online service that doesn’t do that. Are there any?
Don’t almost all “free trials” on the Internet require credit card info?
What annoy me are sites where there’s no indication that payment might ever be expected, and you’re asked for payment method only after wasting a minute filling in a form.
YES! And when that happens I always bail out on principle. It’s slimy. I know why they do it, but its still slimy and disrespectful of people’s time.
Just like at the grocery store. You pick up what you think is on sale. Different size mistakened
Even if you catch it at the check out register-they think you’ll take it anyway because of the trouble it takes to go back and get the right one. Also on returning an item you were charged wrongly for. they figure, too much trouble.
Lots of marketing cheats out there…lots
At the grocery store, the sale sign will be right under the product that’s actually on sale. If you mess that up, it’s pretty much on you.
I’d point out that if you’re into genealogy, you can walk away with quite a bit of free research in 14 days. In return you’re only being asked to demonstrate an interest and ability in paying at some point. I could understand the outrage if it were a real hassle to cancel, but they make it quite easy.
What concerns me more is how difficult some places make it to cancel. Back in the early days when everyone was getting those “free” AOL disks, it was almost impossible to quit.
Not that I ever signed up for AOL…
It’s not all that difficult, really. The best thing to do for any of these types of offers is to cancel immediately after you sign up. That way you won’t forget to do it later (which they count on) and you can still use the service for the specified time. You can do the same thing with sites that have an ‘autopay’ feature that renews you at the end of the year. Sign up, pay, cancel the subscription, and use the service for the paid period. I wish there was a law that required companies to send you renewal notification so you could opt out, but until then, this works pretty well.
May I Pit Ancestry.com for something else? Ancestry.com has a huge collection of Family Trees – I’m sure it’s unequalled in scope. (I’m also sure some of the trees are quite unreliable, but that’s not the point of my Pitting.)
It is extremely difficult to view a Family Tree. When you click View Family Tree, you get an elegant(?) graphic tree, but often so huge that it’s time-consuming to scroll just to see an ancestor’s parents. And the display is immune to copy-paste: If you want to keep the info to peruse offline you can’t even do screenshot-print (the parents may be at the opposite end from the children, one or more screenwidths away) – you’d have to copy the data by typing with your own fingers. No normal text ancestor table, no Gedcom available, etc. NOT user-friendly (but somehow good for Ancestry revenue-wise?)
Or is this just my ignorance? Is there a way to get a text-format, copiable ancestor table (relative to one specified individual) for an Ancestry.com Public Member Tree?
That doesn’t have to do with how difficult it is to cancel, though. Many websites make it very, very easy to sign up and then make you jump through hoops to cancel.
For example, BlueApron.com required me to email them in order to get a link to their cancellation page. I didn’t have to email them in order to get a link to sign up. It’s a relatively minor example, sure, but it’s irritating as hell because it’s so obvious. They make it easy to sign up, then add extra steps to cancel, knowing they’ll get at least some people who stick around for another week or two because of that annoyance.
I’ve heard of worse examples where a company makes it easy to sign up online but requires you to make a phone call and navigate a phone tree in order to cancel.
I’d love for there to be a law that says any subscription service of any kind must be equally easy to sign up for and cancel. If you can sign up using the Internet, you must be able to cancel using the Internet, and without additional nag screens requiring you to fill out some survey or begging you to stay.
Yeah, it’s not like it’s every vaguely written and you get to the register and are told “Sorry, the sale is just on the small bags of weembozots.” or “Just two per customer.” or “Not that brand of bananacleaner, sorry.” or “That’s not what ‘take three pay for two’, means!”
Unless its not. The can of beans is on sale for $0.68, after waiting in line at the checkout and bagging all your stuff you get the receipt and decide to look and remember what the beans cost. Turns out they’re $1.26. Are you going to interrupt the line of people behind you that are already getting rung up for less than a buck?
Gas stations pull this type of shit all the time. “Oh, the computer must not have been updated, sorry about that”. The underpaid clerk of course doesn’t give a shit, I can’t blame them, but it pisses me off enough to start checking to see if I’m being ripped off.
I must be shopping in the wrong grocery store as I’ve don’t recall ever seeing a sale sign that didn’t specify the brand, size, type and number allowed of any product being offered on sale. Granted, signs get moved by idiots sometimes but that’s not the stores fault.
Reading is fundamental.
If you lived here you could get it for free at the library. We don’t offer remote access to that one, but a lot of libraries also have the library edition.
This is the first time I ever encountered this. It offended me enough to throw it to the Pit.
Exactly: looking at it in advance, how can I possibly have known whether it would be easy, or difficult, to cancel? I’m happy to learn, now, that AO makes it easy…but they might just as well have been one of the services that makes you jump through a lot of hoops. They’re asking me to fly blind, and I don’t like that.
That’s unpleasant! It makes me think I may have been lucky to have avoided the sons of bitches in the first place. Thank you for the warning!