By Morten Suhr Hansen
A few weeks ago, the US presidential election campaign hit the subscription world with a bang! This happened when current President Joe Biden, along with Vice President and future Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, launched a comprehensive package of legislation called ‘Time is Money’.
The legislative package is a cohesive effort to create better conditions for consumers, with the aim of saving them both time and money when dealing with businesses across a wide range of industries. One of the key proposals focuses on making it easier for subscribers to cancel their subscriptions. In practice, it should be as simple to cancel a subscription as it is to sign up for it in the first place.
Biden and Harris believe that while many subscription companies strive to deliver great experiences to their customers, there are a remarkable number of bad actors whose strategy is to make canceling subscriptions unnecessarily difficult, and this has created the need for legislative action.
Make subscriptions great again
I think there is good reason to welcome this American initiative. I think many of us have at some point dealt with an American subscription service and experienced how complicated and frustrating it can be as a customer. Where we have been sent on an endless safari across their website to find a ‘cancel’ button that works. I have previously written about Adobe after I was made aware of their somewhat questionable approach to handling cancelations.
It’s important to emphasize that the Biden-Harris proposal is not an attack on subscription companies in general. Quite the contrary. In the notes to the proposal, they acknowledge that subscriptions in general often make life easier for many consumers and at the same time push society in a more innovative and technologically advanced direction.
It’s about ensuring that consumers don’t lose trust in subscriptions. About separating the black sheep from the white. About making subscriptions great (again).
In Denmark, the legislation is in place, but are we doing enough?
So, does this whole story about the US subscription market have any relevance for Danish consumers and Danish subscription companies. I would argue that it does.
It’s true that Denmark and the rest of Europe generally have a higher level of consumer protection than it has traditionally been the case in the U.S. And if you look at the Danish rules in this area, they are also quite clear. According to Section §28a of the Danish Consumer Contracts Act, ‘the trader must ensure that the termination of a contract for ongoing delivery of goods or services can take place using the same medium or technical platform on which the contract was concluded’.
In short: If you can sign up for a subscription on a company’s website, you must also be able to cancel it on the same website. There is no doubt about that, and the Danish Consumer Ombudsman has successfully pursued several cases, forcing companies to comply with this rule.
The challenge is that Danish law does not require the cancellation process to be as easy as signing up. Only that the option must exist. This leaves room for interpretation, and unfortunately, I still see Danish subscription companies, even reputable ones, not taking this seriously enough.
Give your subscribers a graceful goodbye, so they feel welcome to return
As someone who genuinely values subscriptions, I believe it’s a bad idea not to make it easy for subscribers to cancel. And not just a bad idea, it’s also bad business.
Today, a subscription is not something consumers commit to for life. The modern subscription consumer has become a ‘super-switcher’, a consumer who jumps in and out of various subscriptions. So in all likelihood, the subscriber you say goodbye to today will return in the future. However, I know plenty of examples from my social circle of people who have said that they will never return to a particular subscription company because it was too much hassle to cancel. Consumers perceive this as unprofessional and far too easy to figure out.
As a subscription business, you have to be concerned about giving your subscribers what the Americans would call a ‘beautiful exit’. That way, it’ll hopefully lead to a beautiful reunion before too long.
P.S. The expression ‘Make Subscriptions Great Again’ is entirely my own. It is NOT a phrase borrowed from Biden-Harris. They haven’t started recycling old Trump slogans. That’s all there is to it, just as I am not expressing an opinion on the upcoming U.S. presidential election, although I do support the Biden-Harris proposal. But it’s going to be interesting!
