Easy To Cancel makes it Easier to Sign Up

Posted on by

Don’t you just hate it when you have to mail in a letter or call a phone number to cancel your “Free Trial”? Chances are your potential customers do too.

The only way to combat this notion is to tell your customers how easy it is to cancel your service right when you ask for their Credit Card information.

This comment on Hacker News blew my mind:

“The reason I think long and hard before signing up for new web services isn’t even the cost 99% of the time, but the uncertainty in how difficult it is going to be to cancel should I decide I do not want to continue.” George McBay

Checkout what Netflix does to combat this:

Step 1: They don’t show the credit card form. They just want to grab your email address so they can send you marketing emails in case you don’t sign up on the 2nd step.

(click on image for a bigger image)

Step 2: Make it very obvious that your customer can cancel online anytime easily. {tweet}

Do you know other ways to combat the “It Sucks To Cancel” notion? Let me know in the comments.

17 Comments

  3. I wonder if accepting paypal makes people feel like they can cancel easily since they can always manage their subscriptions within their paypal account?

    • Hi Jordan – I think people are at ease with PayPal because the customer can easily dispute the charge and get their money back.

      We’ve seen conversions go up for Flying Cart customers when they use PayPal.

  5. Being up front and clear about cancelling helps a little but the fundamental
    problem is that many of these companies are simply untrustworthy.

    For example, “online” cancellation is frequently actually web form email
    to a person who finds all sorts of ways to delay the cancellation.
    For this reason alone I do not take seriously companies that make
    a song and dance about easy cancellation. Usually they’re lying.

    Webform email in general is a pain because it makes it difficult
    for the sender to keep a copy of the correspondence.

    Incidentally, multiple page signup with email required on the first page is
    a definition indication they’re untrustworthy.

    • Hi Jono – Yes, untrustworthy companies ruin it for all of us.

      What is key to understand is that you have to do things that will improve business from your end. Which might mean a multi-step checkout process. Test to see what works and practice good business ethics.

  6. I think it’s a nice idea. However, like Jono above, I don’t believe companies will follow through. If anything this gives the thief companies another weapon to pull in unsuspecting consumers.

    Overall it’s like many altruistic ideas: the people that are truly trustworthy/good are the ones that will follow these steps and follow through (even though they probably already are bending over backwards being honest and easy to deal with customers) and the sneak thiefs will go on about their business as usual.

    • Hi Dan – Business owners shouldn’t worry about the ethics of other businesses. You have to do what works for your business and do what you think is right.

  7. Pingback: Easy To Cancel makes it Easier to Sign Up | fozbaca’s WordPress

  8. Interesting that you use Netflix as an example this week. Can you make it too easy? Netflix reported this week that they lost 800,000 customers after their recent blunders.

    • Great point Ben! NetFlix is a pretty savvy company, I’m sure they run a ton of experiments to see what type of page gets the most people to sign up.

      That said – they probably didn’t think people will leave in massive amounts when they doubled the price.

    • haha yeah over 800,000 people have. I think you would have cancelled regardless of how hard it was.

      Also making your recurring product easy to cancel will reduce the amount of credit card charge backs that your business gets.

Comments are closed.