Amazon Prime is a neat idea. My wife subscribes to it, and Amazon lets others in the same house use it without paying additional money, so it's doubly neat. If you aren't familiar with the plan, you pay $79 a year in exchange for free, two-day shipping on almost anything you purchase directly from Amazon. There are numerous exceptions. I bought a monitor recently that wasn't eligible for Prime, and third-party sellers don't count, either.

While the plan itself is good, Amazon's billing and sign-up system for it isn't. You can get one month of Amazon Prime for free by going to this page, and if you don't cancel after that month, you get billed for a year of the service. At $79, that's something people notice pretty quickly on their credit card.

Then they get mad, not having any idea what the vague listing of "AMZ*Prime" is supposed to mean or what they actually bought. Steaks, maybe? With that Z and an asterisk, it just kind of looks like a scam, doesn't it?

Techdirt notes that people may not be smart enough to cancel their Prime trial plans, but they are savvy enough to search the web for "AMZ*Prime" to see what's up. That's where the trouble really starts, because that search on Google doesn't get you to Amazon and a billing dispute page, which would be useful, but rather to an old story that Techdirt wrote about Amazon Prime two years ago. (That search on Yahoo or MSN does get you something more useful, however: This Amazon page. That search on Ask.com takes you to a page of spam.)

And then people, still unclear on the concept, send angry mail to Techdirt, not Amazon, demanding the charges be reversed.

There are two things at work here: First, search engines can still often offer less than perfect results. While the Techdirt story is completely relevant to the issue, it is not really the "best" link on the subject. Second, people tend not to think critically when their money is on the line. Simply reading the story on the linked page probably would have solved their problem by giving them a hint on where to go to complain. Instead, they look for the nearest "contact us" link, because it's easier to vent to the closest bystander than actually figure out what went wrong.

Oddly enough, I'm all too familiar with this phenomenon. My inbox is regularly stuffed with people's questions about billing for other Yahoo! services (I'm not affiliated with any other part of Yahoo! than Yahoo! Tech) or demands to know when the next version of Yahoo! Messenger will come out for Vista.

It's something to consider next time you're playing search engine sleuth. Just because it's the first hit on Google, doesn't mean it's what you're looking for. And Amazon, hey, knock off that automatic billing business, OK?

LINK: An Open Letter To Jeff Bezos: Please Stop Pissing Off People Over Amazon Prime