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    Question about renewing my membership

    I know I have mentioned this in the past, but I don't remember the reasoning behind it. (Old age is setting in I guess.)

    My yearly membership expires on the 14th of this month....I want to renew it, so why do I have to wait until my membership expires, then rejoin the site? Isn't there something or someway that you can change things so that I can just sign up to be rebilled, even if the rebilling costs more money each year? It just seems silly that I have to wait until my subscription expires, then rejoin in order to continue to have access to the site. It would be so much easier if you could just automatically charge my credit card for another year so that I don't have to go through this every year. I mean, Rhapsody does it, Giganews does it, so why can't AW do it? What is the problem with having automatic subscription renewals if the subscriber wishes to do that?

    #2
    I asked about this a couple of years ago, as I recall it was something from the credit-processor. Max. 3 months can auto-rebill. (I know we have a law in the Netherlands that enforces something like this to but this was also the case when AW was in Auss)

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      #3
      Thanks for the response Frans! I asked the question to find out if it might be due to some law or regulations that AW has to adhere to. I guess in 4 minutes, I'll have to rejoin.

      Comment


        #4
        Heya, myeah not too sure. I think the answer is 'yes and no'; at the time of your legacy subscription's devising, it evidently was some kind of policy (probably in observation of some kind of regulation) because rebills are impossible on that type of subscription. That said, if you were to join up on a new annual subscription, rebills are an option now. So I guess something changed. The reason you can't have rebills on your legacy subscription in light of this is simply a technical one; the rules of that subscription are locked in time.

        I'll prod Garion, who might have more solid, specific, first-hand knowledge on the matter.

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          #5
          Hi folks,

          This is a legacy issue. When we started out, yearly rebilling subscriptions of hundreds of dollars for online services were rare, and we were concerned that people might sign uop, forget, get rebilled, then chargeback (charge-backs are a very big problem for all online retailers, and if not managed carefully, can cause a company to go out of business).

          More recently, we changed this policy (as annual rebilling services are much more common, we sensed the market would bare this, and the risk of chargebacks are reduced), annual subs DO rebill (and customers get a discount for rebilling, in fact). However, people who joined on "grandfathered" accounts (that accounts at a certain $ per period at that time, but the $ amount has increased now), are on these old, non-rebilling yearly accounts.

          Dek, your options are not great:

          (1) Switch to a new-style account, I suspect pay a lot more than you're currently paying, and be rebilled yearly
          (2) Stay on your cheaper, non-rebilling yearly account, and have to rejoin each year

          It's possible for us to fix this, but it's an annoyingly large amount of work due to some poor coding decisions we made a long time ago, so it's not high priority. it is a bug that is lodged, however.

          Comment


            #6
            Originally posted by garionhall View Post
            Hi folks,

            This is a legacy issue. When we started out, yearly rebilling subscriptions of hundreds of dollars for online services were rare, and we were concerned that people might sign uop, forget, get rebilled, then chargeback (charge-backs are a very big problem for all online retailers, and if not managed carefully, can cause a company to go out of business).

            More recently, we changed this policy (as annual rebilling services are much more common, we sensed the market would bare this, and the risk of chargebacks are reduced), annual subs DO rebill (and customers get a discount for rebilling, in fact). However, people who joined on "grandfathered" accounts (that accounts at a certain $ per period at that time, but the $ amount has increased now), are on these old, non-rebilling yearly accounts.

            Dek, your options are not great:

            (1) Switch to a new-style account, I suspect pay a lot more than you're currently paying, and be rebilled yearly
            (2) Stay on your cheaper, non-rebilling yearly account, and have to rejoin each year

            It's possible for us to fix this, but it's an annoyingly large amount of work due to some poor coding decisions we made a long time ago, so it's not high priority. it is a bug that is lodged, however.
            Hi there my friend!

            Thanks for the explanation. At least I now understand the situation and the reasons behind it. This is what I was curious about and I appreciate the answers. Thanks.

            Oh, and one other problem that you'd probably run into with a yearly re-billing.....every time I try to charge something to my credit card for something overseas, my credit card company denies the charge and puts a hold on my credit card until I call them to verify the charge.(I had to just do this when I tried to re-join AW.) Since the credit card company does this to prevent fraud, if I had an automatic rebill, the charge wouldn't go through anyway, so I'd still have to make a phone call and do everything manually, so a re-bill wouldn't work for me even if you offered it.

            Hmmm, now that I think about it, would it be possible for legacy members like me (or any member for that matter) to sign up for more than one year?(with no refunds if you decided to cancel your membership.) I was thinking that maybe if I could sign up for two, three, four or five years, that would be really helpful. Heck, signing up for 5 years would make it a bit easier for me and you'd have 5 years worth of money, even if I died. Is something like that possible?
            Last edited by Dekoda; 14 August 2013, 11:43 PM.

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