My first thought is are they adding enough value to take a 30% cut off a digital subscription service?

But then I flipped the question to whether as a consumer, I would be more likely to be a digital subscription with a "Subscribe with Amazon" button.

Hell yes!

I just logged into my Economist account to try and cancel my subscription and failed to find any way to do that. Emailed support, they said "we would be happy to help you, call us during business hours...".

I would love all my subscriptions to be managed by Amazon under a single interface.

I would also be more likely to "try out a subscription" knowing I could easily get out of it without dancing through hoops.

Subscription providers shoot themselves in the foot when they do unethical practices like forcing people to call in and sit on hold to cancel. Its even a violation of Visa's rules to not provide digital way to unsubscribe.

Thanks! That explains why the Economist here is so keen on signing up people via direct debit.

The Economist makes it particularly hard. Surprisingly low level of ethics for a publication of such repute.

Totally. This would be the only way I'd ever subscribe to NYT again.

Just got through doing this with another subscription. I was considering just putting a block on them with my CC. Would that be legal?

A standard perk of credit cards is you can end recurring payments. Just file a dispute on the last charge and indicate you want to end the recurring charge. Sometimes the merchant is able to reverse the dispute, but most often times decisions go in consumer's favor (particularly when you provide proof that you took reasonable steps to try to cancel before disputing).

I've gone as far as getting months of gym memberships over turned after they told me one thing in person and then told me another thing a few months later when I started getting billed again. Charge backs and the point systems are the best things about credit cards.

That's why I subscribed to the economist through my iPad. Unsubscribing from newspapers is a pain.

I still have warm fuzzy feelings about Netflix because they make cancelling so easy.

I know someone who is about to launch a very niche "box of the month" type service, where a box of items are mailed out each month. This would have been great as she could just have an amazon subscriptions page and a static website that links to it.

But no, it's for "digital app, website, or software" only.

Why would I go to amazon.com to sign up for dropbox? I'm not getting it.

> Why would I go to amazon.com to sign up for dropbox?

Because you, like a few hundred other million people, were already on amazon.com and it was recommended to you.

I like that it centralizes payments, like PayPal. So I wouldn't have to have 10 different websites who all want to store my debit/credit card info themselves.

So just an FYI for those here who sign up or if anyone from Amazon reads this.

The phone number field gives you a "this field is required" error if you type dashes or any other non numeric characters in the field. Remove all non numeric to get past that error.

Also, the confirmation email that you receive after you sign up comes in with the word "Subject" on the email subject line. This threw me off a bit and I almost deleted it.

Customer Side: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/browse.html/?node=14498690011

Quote: "How to Make Money

For a customer’s first year as a subscriber, you receive 70% of each transactional amount.

After a subscriber’s first year, your revenue increases to 85% of each transactional amount. "

That's a bit more than Stripe or Braintree.

I don't think they are equal comparisons because Amazon is offering a marketplace where your service can be discovered...theoretically they are bringing you more customers. Stripe and Braintree only offer payment processing.

Amazon always fails to make their payments services sufficiently international to be any use outside the US.

I can see this doing well for paid online training programs such as Treehouse and similar. Especially if Amazon does give you exposure and you end up being featured.

I don't see why you can't utilize this for the exposure in addition to a payment provider such as Stripe for the people that come directly to your site/app outside of Amazon.

If I integrate this into my app/saas product, is their support for one-off in-app purchases or can I only sell subscriptions without being able to sell digital goods as well?

you could... use your credits?

What is brilliant?

Amazon is basically creating an ecosystem for subscription based businesses where they hold all the customers hostage in return for a piece of your action.

Their profit strategy