A Short Chat With Shutterstock About Auto-renew
Back Story
Shutterstock is a useful source for clip art and stock photography. They sell in a variety of packages, which is amenable to different use cases. You can buy a monthly allotment if you know you will be regularly dipping into their troves of business imagery. Alternately, you can simply pay for lots of 5, 10, or 25 images with relevant discounts for volume.
Depending on what you need to do or what your business with clip art is, you can generally find the type of service you want.
However, they are manipulative of their users in a way that degrades customer trust; whenever you purchase any package — even a block of 5 images on demand — the purchase is automatically set to “auto-renew.”
You have to presciently log in, navigate through their UI to “Plans,” and then click the link to “Turn off” Auto Renewal.
Interesting to those who understand UI, they elected to make “Turn Off” a text-only link that is followed by a confirmation pop-up. However, after you have turned it off, “Turn On” is a button.
If they want to get more people to give them money accidentally and get no value from it, this is smart. Research and conventional wisdom about web behaviors says that people are more likely to click buttons than links. Also, there is no confirmation pop-up to slow them down if they activate auto-renew.
If you use their service irregularly, this will generate revenue for them that does not create value for you. It wrests control of your spending from you and gives it to them. Since there are some UI decisions about it, this looks like a really calculated way of trying to increase revenue.
This is not a lot of money for some of us, but for other organizations it could be significant. Regardless of the number, the intention is troubling. Essentially, I see Shutterstock building a business model that uses small money-for-nothing exchanges with a lot of clients to increase revenue.
I see Shutterstock building a business model that uses small money-for-nothing exchanges with a lot of clients to increase revenue.
I just don’t think that Shutterstock needs to do that to be successful. I also think that I would like to trust the companies I work for. So, because I like to give people an opportunity to improve, I “rang up” their customer service chat machine. Transcript follows:
Transcript of short chat with Shutterstock on Auto-renew policy
Sacha: Thank you for contacting Shutterstock!
Sacha: Hi Joel.
Me: howdy
Sacha: The Auto Renew feature cannot be changed, it’s set up to be active automatically unless you disable it, the’re no way to do the reverse.
Me: How do I let your business people know that it is disrespectful to your clients to have it set up that way?
Sacha: Through me, I can submit the suggestion to them on our site.
Me: Please do, CC me. Something like “Give your clients the respect to control their own expenditures. Make it so that they opt-IN to auto-renew, not have to discover and opt-OUT after being charged for something they do not want and can not derive value from. Build connection with your clients through trust and integrity rather than through only considering what gets you the most revenue this month.”
Sacha: I’ll submit your comment, however there is no way to CC you o the submission as it is an internal channel that we use.
Me: OK. Feel free to have anyone contact me with an explanation or response or solution: <my.email.addy>
Sacha: Of course, I’ll add your email to the comment. Is there anything else I can help you with today?
Me: Nope
