I’m trying really hard to be an early adopter. It’s against my natural inclination. So, you can imagine how proud I was of myself when I signed up to Quickflix, the new movie streaming service which launched back in March.

I paid my money, or so I thought. I remember being very under-whelmed by the number of titles available to view. But, I thought, as an early adopter I’m lending my support to something that can only get better.

After I paid I received the confirmation email. So far so good.

Confirmation email - clearly I have subscribed

I tried the service out by starting the stream of Stand by Me – it was slow and the quality wasn’t that great. I decided to wait a few weeks.

Tonight I had another go. Imagine my surprise to find I hadn’t signed up at all. Quickflix had debited my credit card for $0.01 cents but then told me I needed to ‘upgrade’ my membership. I’m guessing that the $0.01 cent charge was a test to see if the credit card worked but this approach was never communicated to me. But, when I login under the My Account tab I get this message:

Does this suggest I have paid?

What’s more to cancel the membership I thought that I had I can’t simply stop the payments online. I need to phone the call centre and actually talk to someone. I don’t want to do this. I ‘joined’ online, I feel like I should be able to ‘unjoin’ on line as well.

Phone to cancel? I don't think so...

The whole experience felt a lot like I was using a site from six years ago, when e-commerce was cutting edge, and really really bad. I just can’t see this working well for them.

When I log in to my account to see my payment history I get this message:

Currently outstanding due to what????

The experience is really confusing, and a bit alarming. I’ve had no further emails to say I need to pay and yet I feel like I’ve signed up.

Quickflix – you need to get your act together and make this better, or I’ll be be phoning to cancel!