> Less than 4 hours after finding out about the issue here's a complete explanation of what happened, a public apology, and an appropriate fix.

Or it indicates that they knew about it before hand and were working on it. Either way, I agree with you. Good customer service.

good customer service would have been to notify their customers every time they are going to charge against their card vs having to have the customer monitor explicitly what charges instacart is making.

They made a mistake. They admitted it. Your argument is an appeal either to time travel or omniscience. It is hard to understand what you expect from them at this point.

I don't buy the application of "mistake" that companies like to use. No, changing your pricing model and (by many accounts) simply not telling your customers, or not ensuring -- however difficult -- that all of your customers were told, is not a mistake. It's professional negligence, or whatever you call that when a company does it.

As many have pointed out, it's not acceptable to just continue running with a broken business model. That benefits no one. But changing your model and either not making absolutely sure to tell your customers or neglecting the attempt is just plain dishonest.

The cynic in me wonders if companies choose opt-out models because they think that a subset of their customers are not going to be bothered opting out.

A while back there was a lawsuit over one of the Canadian cable companies doing an opt out (negative option billing) and in general its not really considered a good business practice.

Of course they do, and many of them will make it as difficult as possible to switch without making it look like they're doing just that. Something you're taught is to make the "cost of switching" as high as possible.

I, personally, have continued to pay for a service I no longer used simply because it was such a pain in the ass to cancel.

You feel comfortable calling these people "plain dishonest"? Would you say that to their faces? Maybe reconsider; your point might be better cast as "it is a mistake not to be careful to ensure your customers are aware of business model changes".

I did not say that. What they did was "plain dishonest." I don't call myself a stupid person, but I have done (and will in the future do) stupid things. That does not make me stupid, and it does not make stupid things I do intelligent.

You are pushing to soften the insistence that customers should have regarding how they are charged. I don't see how that's a better approach than actually holding a company accountable for its actions, without necessarily judging the character of their employees or management.

Edit: Yes, I would say that to their faces. Exactly as I said it here, without personal judgment, but with a judgment regarding their conduct.

Hold on. Let's not forget where this started. They did try to tell their customers - via email. Your objection is that the form of notice they used was inadequate.

That's a fair objection, but choosing an inadequate form of notice, by itself, isn't dishonesty. Knowingly choosing inadequate notice would be the problem. To me it seems equally (if not more) plausible that someone, mistakenly, didn't realize that email notice wasn't good enough.

I'll also add that it isn't clear that email notice was inadequate. Are there cases of people outside the 71 who were unhappy learning about the change from another channel (like this one)?

I hope one day, when you have a business, that you don't treat your customers in this way.

Amazingly enough, he does run a business.

http://www.matasano.com/about/

Ugh that page is terrible, must rewrite.

so when companies knowingly hide credit card charges, and doesn't notify users of term changes that may affect customers especially when it comes to hidden charges.. I don't expect anything, other than to bring to public what kind of company this is. Is it really a mistake to charge people's credit cards without notification ?

Yes it really is a mistake, and you're being obnoxious. Please stop.

I disagree, he's not being obnoxious, the apology isn't super clear so he could be mistaken.

It reads like they've decided to take $99 from previously free customers on the basis of them not complaining when they were sent an email. If thats the case, I personally think it's a pretty crappy practice and any customer that claims to have not recieved the email should be entitled to a refund.

If thats not the case, they should probably take a look at the message because it's confusing.

p.s. Please don't come back with a selective quote. The "what happens" seems to conflict with the "Next steps" which is why I'm confused.

Hrm, I agree with what you said. I overreacted. Wiping my comment.

You're right. You get the stake, I'll get the kindling.

As far as I can tell they only offered to refund the $99 subscription fee, and not the excess delivery charges that the subscribers have been being charged for <$35 deliveries without their consent.

They should make good their customers entire financial loss.

"First, we’re going to refund all delivery fees paid by the people affected by this bug."

Ah must have missed that on initial reading (also judging by the number of upvotes I wasn't the only one).

They admitted (claimed?) they had a bug and apologized for the bug. They didn't acknowledge the real mistake: converting people from free to paid without their explicit approval (not just emailing them altered terms). That needed to be opt-in, not opt-out.

It appears as though they haven't even rectified that. It's still opt out. They're going to email 71 customers asking if they want a refund. What if they don't respond? No refund, right? What about the people who got the first email but didn't cancel, they still get charged, right?

I would find it difficult to trust any company with my credit card info if I knew the only thing standing between me and new charges for things I don't want was reading every email they send me.

They acknowledged exactly that, reversed the charges, and offered a full refund. I am again left wondering what you actually expected them to do.

I don't understand the situation of the other n-71 users. Instacart send an email to them, but apparently the users didn't have to confirm the upgrade.

What happened with the mails that got lost, went to the spam folder, where ignored because it looks like standard press release, went to the secondary mail account?

There was a post by someone who seems to have worked there claiming the mistake was when they were querying for the users to send the email to. Basically 71 of us were not included in the results of that query so the email was never actually sent to us.

Read the post again. They did not reverse the charges. They gave 71 people the opportunity to claim a refund. What they should have done was automatically issued a refund to everybody they charged - not just the 71 who didn't receive the email - because they never should have charged anybody who didn't opt-in.

Are we reading the same post? "First, we’re going to refund all delivery fees paid by the people affected by this bug."

>Second, we’re going to give these customers the choice to >either:

>Receive a full refund of the Instacart Express subscription >fee immediately >Continue as a subscriber of Instacart Express for the next >year. We’ll extend the end date of your subscription >through April 30, 2014. This option includes unlimited free >deliveries for orders over $35.

Still opt-out

Instacart Express != Delivery Fees.

"Receive a full refund of the Instacart Express subscription fee immediately"

They have an option to do that - but if they take no action, they wont receive a refund. And that only applies to the 71 users effected by the bug. The people who got the email but took no action evidently can't even claim a refund.

Can you imagine the backlash if Apple started charging $99/year for iCloud and auto-billed everybody who didn't cancel the service?

There's the other issue of the notice itself. If they decided in March to make the change, how much time did they give customers to decide? Given the timeline, it seems like it was "effective immediately" rather than giving proper ahead of time notice.

Nonetheless, even if they did discuss refunding, the entire process seems shifty. Every service I use (I checked!) warns me five business days in advance by email that they are charging my card or sends a physical mail two weeks in advance. Instacart should be sending an email on each event with the delivery fee spelled out clearly.

You can't win for losing here. A lot of people just won't read your email period. So you can either cancel the accounts of your free users and have 50% of your customer base freak out because you cancelled their account (perhaps wiping history in the process they find important) or you can keep them all active and upgrade them.

How about offering people the option to upgrade? If they decline or don't respond, they remain free users. If they accept, upgrade them.

Am I missing something?

"They remain free users"? That is an option with unlimited downside for Instacart.

They could leave their accounts dormant until the users next signed in then ask them to either accept the charges or deactivate their account. That would be a lot more ethical than just going ahead and charging them and expecting them to opt out if they don't agree to the charges.

And then someone would complain that they were ambushed for an extra $99 fee right when they just wanted to order groceries...

Well the implied assumption here is that the day of the free user is over. So it's only two options - Upgrade or leave.

>converting people from free to paid without their explicit approval

they did not convert people to paid members, they renewed existing memberships for people who had not been been notified of changes to policies of the membership.

I take InstaCart at their word when they say that it was their intention to do the right thing from the beginning and only a small subset of their users were not informed about this change because of a bug.

Since I take them at their word, this means that the "outcry" and the blog post were when they discovered the problem and it's scale. They fixed it in 4 hours. As a user, that works for me.

yes. nicely handled