Source: Xinhua.
“Free membership”, “7-day trial for one cent”, “limited-time 6-yuan diamond membership”. A consumer in Shanxi opened her third-party payment statement recently and winced: video, photo editing, social and music apps she had used only briefly had been quietly charging her bank card for months.
Like her, many internet users find that membership packages are easy to start with a phone scan, but one careless move drops you into a trap set by merchants. An investigation found that some apps use deep auto-renewal tactics to lure consumers in and then set obstacles all over the path to cancellation, violating consumers’ lawful rights.
Deep tactics
The Measures for the Supervision and Administration of Online Transactions, in force since 1 May, stipulate that operators offering auto-extension or auto-renewal services must draw consumers’ attention in a conspicuous way five days before the service starts and before each renewal date, letting consumers choose freely. Yet complaints over app auto-renewal are anything but isolated: consumer complaint platforms list more than 60,000 entries under the keyword “auto-renewal”. The investigation found a battery of tactics:
Auto-renewal with no opt-out. On the membership page of one camera app, the only three subscription options were continuous annual, seasonal and monthly plans. “Some apps only want to be used for a month, but every subscription option defaults to auto-renewal with no alternative; it feels like a forced sale,” one user wrote on a complaint platform.
Fine print hiding traps. A job seeker in Hubei downloaded a professional networking app lured by a “first membership recharge of only 0.1 yuan” page and paid 0.1 yuan through the golden button. About four months later he found the app had charged him 272 yuan. Reopening the page, he discovered a line of small print above the button: “7-day trial, then 68 yuan per month.” Complaint platforms hold some 900 complaints of this kind.
Discount prices that mislead. On a smart TV app, a continuous monthly plan was advertised at a promotional 6 yuan; after paying, the auto-renewal terms showed renewal at 29 yuan per month, to be charged via WeChat Pay one day before expiry.
Some users have developed their own doctrine: “Never subscribe to an app membership on impulse. Do it when you are free and focused, so you can see every trap on the page clearly.”
Easy in, hard out
Falling in is easy; climbing out is not. On some apps, the cancellation flow is so convoluted that consumers wander a maze, and some find no way to a refund at all.
The reporter downloaded 20 apps with auto-renewal: only 6 allowed cancellation inside the app, while 14 required navigating to a fourth- or fifth-level menu in a third-party payment platform to complete it. Some apps email a reminder before charging but omit any cancellation method.
“To cancel one auto-renewal I spent a full 20 minutes on the phone with customer service, going through transfers, logins, verification and six or seven steps,” a Shanghai resident said.
Some apps charge the next billing cycle a few days before it starts, with no refund possible. Worse, some apps keep charging after being removed from app stores. A resident of Henan downloaded a camera app called swagie through a short-video promotion link early this year.
“It demanded a 48-yuan payment to use, but after paying it wouldn’t work, so I uninstalled it. Seven months later I found it had been charging 48 yuan through a third-party payment platform every week, about 1,400 yuan in total. Now the app can’t even be found in app stores and there’s no way to reach customer service,” she said.
Give the choice back to consumers
Experts suggest governing disguised forced auto-renewal according to law and returning the power of choice to consumers.
Liu Junhai, a law professor at Renmin University of China, said deceptively forcing consumers into auto-renewal violates the Consumer Rights Protection Law, the E-commerce Law and the online transaction supervision measures, as well as the principles of good faith, fairness and autonomy in the Civil Code.
“The market regulator should lead internet companies in self-inspection and self-correction, cleaning up the standard-form clauses and auto-renewal interfaces in consumer apps, with priority on the chaos of inducing consumers into auto-renewing memberships,” said Pan Helin of Zhongnan University of Economics and Law.
“Under the relevant rules, third-party payment platforms can be required to give consumers conspicuous reminders five days before default deduction, let them choose to cancel or continue, provide a convenient cancellation entry, and explore a cooling-off reversal for deductions so consumers can easily cancel payment orders,” said lawyer Zhao Zhanling of Beijing Yunjia Law Firm.
Pan added that platforms could be required to set up complaint windows on subscription pages connected between company backends and the consumer supervision platform, and that drawing on e-commerce and gaming platforms, internet companies could be encouraged to offer pay-as-you-go and monthly packages in membership systems to widen user choice.
Xue Jun, vice dean of Peking University Law School, suggested that where internet companies keep infringing consumers, the consumers themselves, consumer associations or procuratorates could sue through civil or public-interest litigation, or the market regulator could order rectification, with legal accountability for repeat offenders.
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