Consumer education: online purchases

Self-tutoring about buying things online (or attempting to): the tutor mentions a confusing scenario.

Today I was trying to buy an online software subscription. One might think doing so would be easy, but not always, it seems, are such things so easy as one might imagine. In fact, I couldn’t complete the transaction.

One very bogus thing seems typically to happen during purchasing online software: they dance you down the process, getting you to enter the payment information, etc., then, at the last minute, they make you agree to one or more long license agreements.

In this case, there were links to all the agreements – would you believe there were four? However, one link didn’t work. Not willing to agree to terms that weren’t even available for examination, I wondered what to do.

One might suppose that people just click “agree” and move on. Otherwise, the link wouldn’t be dysfunctional for long, would it?

In my case, unwilling to agree to terms I couldn’t access, I had no choice but to let the transaction die.