Questionable Billing Practices for iPhone Member Upgrades

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SnowcrashedOut

Chess.com still isn’t recognizing membership upgrades on iPhones. People pay to upgrade then don’t have access to the features they paid for. They close their apps and restart, spend time online and in forums like these looking for fixes, and try a bunch of other nonsense without success.

I had that exact same problem (as have countless other users on this and other forums) with three different accounts over the last five years, and it has me questioning whether these problems are bugs, or an intentional feature.

How many tens or hundreds of thousands of users come to chess.com through Apple, then pay to upgrade their memberships on their iphones? Apple takes what, a 25%+ cut of those user billings. Huge money.

So, whether deliberate or not, chess.com learned that when many

When users can’t get access to the advertised benefits they just paid for on their iPhones, what do they do?

Some idiots (like me) upgrade directly on the chess.com site and end up being charged for two paid memberships on the same account (yeah, for all chess.com’s sophistication, that insanely basic membership management no-no is somehow allowed), but most members will reach out directly to chess.com and (as I did with the THREE different accounts that each had this exact same problem over last 5 years), end up putting their credit cards directly on file with chess.com for their paid memberships and cutting Apple out of the picture entirely.

I’ve been in consumer services and memberships for 25 years, and have very hard time believing this very basic problem has somehow persisted for years (affecting and inconveniencing countless users), is not at some lever, a deliberate scheme or, at minimum, convenient negligence.

notmtwain
SnowcrashedOut wrote:

Chess.com still isn’t recognizing membership upgrades on iPhones. People pay to upgrade then don’t have access to the features they paid for. They close their apps and restart, spend time online and in forums like these looking for fixes, and try a bunch of other nonsense without success.

I had that exact same problem (as have countless other users on this and other forums) with three different accounts over the last five years, and it has me questioning whether these problems are bugs, or an intentional feature.

How many tens or hundreds of thousands of users come to chess.com through Apple, then pay to upgrade their memberships on their iphones? Apple takes what, a 25%+ cut of those user billings. Huge money.

So, whether deliberate or not, chess.com learned that when many

When users can’t get access to the advertised benefits they just paid for on their iPhones, what do they do?

Some idiots (like me) upgrade directly on the chess.com site and end up being charged for two paid memberships on the same account (yeah, for all chess.com’s sophistication, that insanely basic membership management no-no is somehow allowed), but most members will reach out directly to chess.com and (as I did with the THREE different accounts that each had this exact same problem over last 5 years), end up putting their credit cards directly on file with chess.com for their paid memberships and cutting Apple out of the picture entirely.

I’ve been in consumer services and memberships for 25 years, and have very hard time believing this very basic problem has somehow persisted for years (affecting and inconveniencing countless users), is not at some lever, a deliberate scheme or, at minimum, convenient negligence.

They are having support issues presently which are at least partly owed to the coronavirus surge and partly owed to the time necessary to cater to the thousands of people closing and reopening their accounts.

With millions of accounts, and a truly international business, it can't be simple or pleasurable to deal with people who make federal cases out of every little thing.

 

Former_mod_david

There's definitely some more complications with memberships paid through Apple and Paypal: cancelling an iPhone membership can't be done on the website alone, you have to go through iTunes as per this support article: https://support.chess.com/article/688-i-bought-my-subscription-through-itunes-or-the-apple-app-store-how-can-i-get-a-refund

Apple's demonstrated history is that they aren't shy of changing up the way they do things and let everyone else catch up, even if it's inconvenient, so I suspect there's been a bit of that along the way too.

Opening and closing accounts doesn't help, and the Chess.com Terms of Service specify that each person is only allowed one active account at a time, so I've closed your other accounts and hopefully this one should be okay.

Cheers,

David, moderator