I really hate it when companies who have a good product spoil it by trying to trick the customer into spending more money than they really want to. Today’s example is LoveFilm.
Last year I wrote an entry about how I was considering trying out one of these new DVD rental services. They all seemed pretty similar, so in the end I chose LoveFilm largely because they offered a few free tickets for Picture House cinemas along with the standard month’s free trial. They are also the people behind the Guardian’s Sofa Cinema service.
The trial went fine – I watched a number of films that I hadn’t seen before – but eventually I decided that the service wasn’t for me. This was largely because I didn’t really like the way that you get sent two random films from your list. I have a wide taste in films and often the films I was sent weren’t films that I was in the mood to watch.
So anyway, I decided that I wanted cancel the service at the end of the free trial. And that’s when things started to go wrong. You can’t cancel an account on the web site. You need to phone them. That means two things. Firstly, they are hoping that most people just won’t bother making that extra phone call and secondly, the customer service people you speak to will do every thing they can to persuade you not to cancel. And sure enough when I made the call I was subjected to all manner of persuasion in an attempt to get me to change my mind. When I held firm, their parting shot was to try to scare me by saying that if my last DVDs weren’t back by my next payment date then I’d be charged for another month.
But I returned the DVDs in time and assumed that my relationship with LoveFilm was over.
They had different ideas and over the last six months I have had frequent mail from them inviting me to rejoin. Most of these offered another month’s free trial, but over christmas I got an offer of a three months trial. I decided to take them up on that offer.
During the signup process they asked me which rental package I wanted a free trial of. There wasn’t much information about what the various packages meant so I just signed up for the most expensive one (as that’s the best value if they’re all free!) A few days later my first rentals arrived and I remembered that I had planned to investigate the packages in more detail.
I discovered that the expensive package that I had signed up for not only included DVDs, but also computer games. And as I rarely play computer games, there was no point being on that package. So I changed down to a cheaper package that only covered DVDs. I confess that at this point I didn’t really read the page that closely.
A couple of days later I was checking my credit card and discovered that LoveFilm had charged me £12.99. I wrote to customer services to find out why and they told me that by changing my package subscription I had cancelled my free trial. Of course, it says that on the page where you change your package so whilst I’m still in discussion with them, it looks like I won’t have a leg to stand on and that I’ve royally screwed up my free trial.
But doesn’t that sound a bit underhand to you? Who is going to want to move from a free trial to a paid package? Seems to me that the only reason to have that functionality available is to catch people you don’t read the small print (and, yes, I admit that’s my own stupid fault) and to trick them into paying money that they don’t need to pay. I know that the page tells you that by changing your package you’ll be cancelling any free trial, but it’s below the fold. It seems to me that it might be more appropriate to have the message in large, flashing red letters – “Warning: this will cancel your free trial and that’s a bloody stupid thing to do!!”
So, as I said, I’m still in discussions with them. I’m hoping they’ll refund the money and put me back on the free trial. If they don’t then I’ll just have to cancel and make the most of the month’s subscription that I’ve paid for. And then wait for the next free trial offer to come along.
Here’s tip for web site developers. If it makes no sense for a customer to take a particular action then don’t offer it to them. Or, at the very least, give them a confirmation screen that makes it clear how stupid this action is.
Update: I’ve just heard back from them. They still haven’t offered a refund, but they have added another three free months of service to the end of this current payment period. That sounds like a reasonable compromise to me.
Still don’t really understand why a customer would want to switch from a free trial to paid package though.