"When you sign up for Amazon Student, you'll receive e-mail alerts for discounts and promotions. If you don't want any more Amazon Student e-mails, you may cancel your Amazon Student membership. If you do this, your Amazon Prime benefits will also end when the membership is canceled."
This is pretty awesome, but note this (from the FAQ):
"When you sign up for Amazon Student, you'll receive e-mail alerts for discounts and promotions. If you don't want any more Amazon Student e-mails, you may cancel your Amazon Student membership. If you do this, your Amazon Prime benefits will also end when the membership is canceled."
The Terms state: "We may ask you to furnish documentation supporting your eligibility. If you do not provide documentation indicating that you meet the eligibility requirements above, you may be required to reimburse us for benefits you received as a result of your Amazon Student membership."
If they call you on it, you may be on the hook for full shipping charges for everything you ordered. Not clear what would happen if you don't pony up but banishment from Amazon would be slightly painful for me, at least.
Considering Amazon themselves send spam this isn't surprising. They like to send out product spam under the guise of account notifications with no opt-out. The only way to remove yourself is to close your account. At the very least they do this to affiliates and to Student Prime members.
> Note: Amazon Mom and Amazon Student members with Amazon Prime shipping benefits and customers receiving a free 30 days of Amazon Prime benefits with Kindle Fire won't be able to share their benefits.
Amazon must know that tons of alums still have .edu email addresses. Perhaps this program is also a form of price discrimination for Prime? Those willing to cheat the system are less likely to pay $80/year than those who won't?
While actually doing the signup is a pain, I just use a “hide-my-email” address and cut it off after I receive the item. And I’d personally prefer to enter my credit card info every time. I once accidentally clicked on the “Yes, sign me up for Amazon Prime today, even though I’ve turned it down literally hundreds of times,” button and they immediately charged my credit card without even an “Are you sure?” Alert. Luckily I was able to cancel and get it refunded relatively easily (after 5 screens of “are you sure?” And “do you want to just pause it for a few months?”).
I wonder if you will immediately get notified of your account closure in person when returning things in a way Amazon doesn't like or will they just send you an email after the fact?
I sent an email to amazon-ir@amazon.com stating that I will cancel my Prime account, Business account, and credit card on February 20th. It’s annoying having to go to different sites for goods, but I think I can manage.
The charity I contributed to got the email and won’t be using Amazon as a vendor any longer.
Charging back on your Amazon prime account will quickly get it closed. Any gift balance you have goes with it. You can probably keep access to your digital purchases if you complain enough.
Hah. Literally an hour ago I fat-fingered the “Sign up to Amazon Music!” button in the Amazon Music App on my phone whilst putting the phone in my pocket.
To be fair to Amazon though, they do let you cancel the subscription online with no bullshit & you still get to keep the 90 day free trial -- presumably they hope you’ll like the service enough to decide to pay for it anyway.
(The worst example I know of this “single button press sign-up” pattern was Nassim Taleb accidentally signing up to pay for a software upgrade to his Tesla in the Tesla App that cost $1000s & having no way to undo it except shouting loudly at Tesla / Elon Musk on Twitter.)
They needed a product that was distributed exclusively through Amazon. So they logged in, added the product to their cart, and then checked out.
At checkout it presented them the "Get free shipping with Prime" prompt, which he says he couldn't find any way past it without signing up.
He only realised he'd signed up for a subscription service when it started sending him emails about other things. He cancelled immediately, and swears he won't buy anything through Amazon again.
Yeah, Amazon is terrible about this. It claims that it must have had the user confirm the purchase, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it didn’t. I order from Amazon about once a year, and the last time I did, they ran the, “Would you also like to sign up for Prime while making this order?” scam on me. I hit the button and immediately realized what I had done. I hit the back button before the next page loaded, but it was too late. I already had an email saying I had signed up without confirming anything or agreeing to any terms of service. Luckily I only had to go through about 3-5 pages of “Are you really sure you want to cancel?” And “how about we just suspend the service but don’t cancel it,” before I was allowed to cancel it. This company is disgusting.
Wouldn't it be hard for Amazon to claim that you owe them more than $80 given that they sell Prime for that price? And, Amazon probably won't ask everyone (or even many students) for proof given that most would probably forget -- an outcome which hurts Amazon's goal of capturing student revenue.
This is brilliant.
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