Internet Marketing

Beware of this Subscription Thief

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A moment ago I searched for a subscription type of website by name. The first result that popped up wasn’t the site I was looking for, but rather another site called howtocancel.us offering to cancel my membership in the site I was searching for.

The actual site I wanted was third down in the search results.

Now imagine you’re selling a subscription of some type. A prospective customer hears about your service and searches for your site, and the first thing they see is another site offering to help you cancel your membership.

What do you suppose that prospect might be thinking?

Maybe they’re thinking, “WOW, that site must have a lot of people cancelling. Or maybe it’s really difficult to cancel. Maybe I should just stay away from it and not even check it out…”

Worse yet, if your prospective customer clicks on the howtocancel.us site, they’ll see this:

Do you want to cancel your subscription with [site name]? We can do it for you! We will send a certified cancellation letter on your behalf with all the necessary information to cancel your subscription. We will keep you informed during the whole process. Cancelling a service has never been easier!

  • Undeniable legal proof.
  • Save time and effort.
  • Give us your contact information and we will do the rest!

This ‘how to cancel’ site may or may not be legitimate. Their Facebook page hasn’t been updated in over 2 years and I find it suspicious that they ask for a LOT of personal information right there on the first page.

But regardless, there’s no doubt they are creating a terrible image for any subscription business by showing up in the search results ahead of the actual subscription site itself.

If you offer subscriptions of any kind, do yourself a favor and search for your business name in Google, Bing, Baidu, Yahoo!, Yandex, Ask and DuckDuckGo. Hopefully the very first result isn’t how to cancel your subscription service.