Asymetrical Subscribe/Unsubscribe Considered Harmful

By asymetrical subscribe/unsubscribe I mean a web service that has one way for subscribing and another for unsubscribing. Typically subscribing is easy - you input your credit card details on a web form and you’re done. If you can subscribe via a web page you should be able to unsubscribe via another web page. But a few online services make it very hard to unsubscribe - I think for obvious reasons. This only serves to annoy users even more - hence making it unlikely a user will ever re-subscribe. 

I first encountered this with audible.com: I was subscribed but I did not have the time to listen to all the books I had downloaded. So I tried to unsubscribe. There was no obvious way to do this from their web pages so I emailed support. “You have to call us...” they tell me. “But I’m in China and I could subscribe via the web why can’t I unsubscribe via the web?” I reply. “OK. We’ll cancel your account.” they say. Apart from the hassles of cancelling my subscription (and their ridiculous URLs) I really like the audible.com service.

My latest encounter with this kind of “customer service” comes from the charlatans of xdrive.com. Again very easy to subscribe. Very easy to give them your money. This was about a year ago. I used the account about once and forgot about it. Looking at my credit card statement recently I noticed a charge from xdrive.com. They had renewed my account - I didn’t ask for it to be renewed nor was I warned via email that this was going to happen.  Again there is no way to unsubscribe from their web site. If you can find the “help” this kind of thing is not even mentioned. So I email them to ask them to cancel. The reply from xdrive.com is “You have to call us...” So I reply that I’m in China etc. “You have to call us...” is the reponse. I try calling them but guess what? Their support is only 9:00AM - 6:00pm their time. How convenient for them! That is the hours when I am mostly asleep.

When are people going to realise that if you offer a service on the web your customers are all over the world in all timezones?