Ack, I'm sorry I didn't catch this in time to save you the trouble of writing up the suggestion -- I explained to you why I didn't let the entry out of the moderation queue, but in case anybody reading these comments in passing is curious, lemme copy the message here:
Automatic renewal is something our payment processor does support, and we'd like to offer it as an option for people in the future: it's good for users like you who don't want their account to expire if they can't access the internet for a little while or who just don't want to worry about remembering to renew, and it's good for us because it means we can make more reliable predictions about future income. We just haven't had the time to figure out how we should present it to people and then do the programming yet: we want our version of automatic renewal to be helpful and convenient, but not charge people's credit cards when they aren't expecting it or wind up with people enrolling in automatic renewal without intending to.
I was also still working for LJ at the point where they introduced automatic renewal, and it caused a *lot* of support requests with people needing help to straighten out their billing because they'd done something they hadn't intended to. There's a certain amount of that we could prevent by being very careful with designing the workflows, but no matter what, introducing automatic renewal would increase the number of people who needed help. We're a really tiny company, so we have to plan carefully whenever we do anything that might increase our support volume.
None of these are problems that can't be solved! And it is on the list. We just haven't had the time to do it yet, and it's a harder thing to design than is immediately obvious.
no subject
Automatic renewal is something our payment processor does support, and we'd like to offer it as an option for people in the future: it's good for users like you who don't want their account to expire if they can't access the internet for a little while or who just don't want to worry about remembering to renew, and it's good for us because it means we can make more reliable predictions about future income. We just haven't had the time to figure out how we should present it to people and then do the programming yet: we want our version of automatic renewal to be helpful and convenient, but not charge people's credit cards when they aren't expecting it or wind up with people enrolling in automatic renewal without intending to.
I was also still working for LJ at the point where they introduced automatic renewal, and it caused a *lot* of support requests with people needing help to straighten out their billing because they'd done something they hadn't intended to. There's a certain amount of that we could prevent by being very careful with designing the workflows, but no matter what, introducing automatic renewal would increase the number of people who needed help. We're a really tiny company, so we have to plan carefully whenever we do anything that might increase our support volume.
None of these are problems that can't be solved! And it is on the list. We just haven't had the time to do it yet, and it's a harder thing to design than is immediately obvious.