Careful with Kindle Unlimited!!

culpepper

I have been trying the free Trial of Kindle unlimited on my PC for a few days.
Today I happened to redeem an amazon voucher on there and realised that I had been charged £26 for something but knew I hadn't actually 'bought' anything on there recently.

A quick look through my orders list showed a kindle Ebook purchase (£26 !!!! for an ebook).
On checking the book's listing it turned out I had clicked on it after seeing it come up under one of the other books I was interested in.

I only search in the actual 'kindle unlimited' section so just imagined it was another unlimited offer and wouldn't have even known about the charge if I hadn't been adding a new gift card to my 'stash'.

Luckily I hadn't downloaded it yet .
The customer service guy told me it not charged to me as it showed up as free when he looked at the transaction but I pointed out that, that was because it had debited my gift card account which always states that it has cost me £0.00 .

He checked again and was able to delete it for me from the archived ebook whatchamacallit and refund my £26 worth of gift vouchers but I wonder how many others may have also clicked on a 'further suggestions' link under the unlimited ebooks listings and unintentionally bought a book.

pmduk

The debit card attached to my kindle is deliberately left empty (with no overdraft) as I find it far too easy to buy accidentally.

culpepper

Good idea!
I did it again but this time I was alert to the problem having already nearly got stung and found I could 'return for a refund' in my order list .
If you have any kind of a gift card balance , it wont show up unless you happen to be looking in the right place (eg the email comes through thanking for the purchase or you happen to be looking at your gift card balance).
They really need to make it more obvious by having only the unlimited books shown when you are in that section ,I think.
I expect that when people click and discover 99p books have been wrongly bought, they sometimes just pay up and keep the thing.

The trouble is that a lot of the ebooks in the lending bit are absolute rubbish and you cant always tell that until you have them to read.

soolin

pmduk wrote: »

The debit card attached to my kindle is deliberately left empty (with no overdraft) as I find it far too easy to buy accidentally.

How does that help though, amazon don't know the status of your bank account and will charge it anyway as purchases are immediate. Payment will go through and your payment will either cause you to go into an unauthorised overdraft, or will bounce and cause your bank to charge you for that.

juno

Kindle Unlimited is also "limited" to 10 books at any one time, and not all books are available

boo_star

soolin wrote: »

How does that help though, amazon don't know the status of your bank account and will charge it anyway as purchases are immediate. Payment will go through and your payment will either cause you to go into an unauthorised overdraft, or will bounce and cause your bank to charge you for that.

They will attempt to charge the card and it will be declined due to insufficient funds. It's pretty rare for UK banks to authorise debit card payments when the funds aren't there to cover the transaction, even for low amounts.

Likewise I'm not aware of any UK bank that charges for declining a debit card transaction. If one takes you overdrawn, yes, but not for being declined.