Monday, December 14, 2009

Perpetuity

I recently gave a subscription to Sports Illustrated as a gift. There is apparently no mechanism on the Sports Illustrated site to buy a single year. Instead, you can buy a year which will automatically renew, with no obvious way to opt out of automatic renewal. If you cancel, the subscription stops immediately and you get a refund. Obviously a lot of people will forget, and the subscription will continue.

I was willing to pay the price on the Sports Illustrated website, but I was not willing to accept the auto-renewal. I was close to getting a different gift, but I discovered that Amazon had a non-renewing single year available, and at a 25% better price.

It seems strange to me that not offering a choice of automatic renewal (especially for a gift subscription) is beneficial--I would expect people interested in a single non-renewing year to skip the whole thing rather than accept being forced into automatic renewal.

1 comment:

  1. Sounds like it's a poor business decision. Although people may forget to not renew and be charged another year, SI could develop a reputation as sneaky.

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