I bought a book from Barnes and Noble once. Just once. That was a few years back and ever since I've been receiving their weekly emails telling me about books that are being released and other such stuff that I'm not interested in. I usually just delete these emails on sight. I know they are not spam, because of my one purchase, but I never got around to actually unsubscribing from the list. But the other day I decided to go ahead and click the "unsubscribe" button and be done with it all.

If only it were that easy.

Typically the unsubscribe links at the bottom of these kinds of emails will either go to page that allows you to login and change your subscription options or will announce that you have been successfully unsubscribed. Barnes and Noble, for whatever reason, created a few extra hoops to jump through.



The yellow box above the form fields reads (emphasis is mine):

You can access your current alert and newsletter subscriptions in the Keep Me Posted! Preference Center. Please enter your email address below and click the "Get My Link" button. We will send you an email with a link to your personal Preference Center, that will allow you to modify all of your subscriptions.

Here is a company that provides me access to my credit card and other personal information online (via username and password, of course) but they can't give me immediate access to my subscription information? Does that seem right to you? I searched, logged in, searched some more but nowhere found a link directly to my subscription options. The only way to get there is by having them send you a link.

After filling in my email address I'm taken to the following screen. At the top it says "Welcome, Stoney." Yep, that's me. They then thank me for requesting the link and assure me it's been sent. But look at the bottom right. Here are four links in which I can sign up for subscriptions... but I can't unsubscribe from them. What's up with that?



I finally get my email with a link to my subscriptions. I go there only to find that I have absolutely no subscriptions checked. None. Zero. All blank.



I spend some time looking around and can't find any place in the "keep me posted" area that suggests I should be receiving any emails whatsoever. Now I have to deal with customer service.

I shoot them an email stating my problem and some time later I get back a canned response on how to unsubscribe. So I reply and explain the situation again. Lucky for me, someone actually read what I submitted and manually unsubscribed me.

But seriously, how hard does it have to be? Unsubscribing from email lists should be easy. Do you think they would make the purchase process require an emailed link to complete an order. Not on your life. I've never had to jump through so many hoops to unsubscribe from a mailing list before, especially from a legitimate company. Honestly it makes me not want to purchase anything from Barnes and Noble again so I don't have to go through this nonsense again.

Make unsubscribing from your mailing list easy. It should be a one- or two-step process at the most. Click unsubscribe, change subscription options and you're done. Simple as that. If someone is going to leave, you don't want them to go with a bitter taste in their mouth!