Why did Azure Marketplace cancel our Bing Search API subscription when I went down the upgrade path?

Question

Hello,

I am posting my experience here at the request of Azure Marketplace phone support.

On Saturday, August 27, I attempted to update our Bing Search API from 500,000 Transactions/month to 1,000,000 Transactions/month. On https://datamarket.azure.com/dataset/bing/search, I chose the green UPDATE button for 1,000,000 Transactions/month ($2,000.00 per month). I chose the blue OK button when I was warned "You already have an active subscription to this offer. Are you sure you want to proceed?" On the subsequent Purchase page, I chose the Next button. This is where it seems something went terribly wrong.

After I chose the Next button on the Purchase page, I received an error in red text that implied our corporate credit card wasn't being accepted. If I recall correctly, my session timed out while I was obtaining our new credit card information. Upon logging in a second time, Bing Search API was no longer listed on the My Data page (https://datamarket.azure.com/account/datasets). To my horror, I also received an email from [e-mail] with the subject line, "Confirmation of cancellation of Bing - Bing Search API". I then confirmed that we no longer had access to the Bing Search API.

At no time did I choose or confirm to cancel our Bing Search API subscription! The first Azure Marketplace phone representative who I talked with placed me on hold to investigate the problem, but I was cut off as he took me off hold. The second phone rep suggested that I must have chosen the red CANCEL button. I explained that I definitely chose the green UPDATE button, and then asked him why I would have seen the Purchase page if I were canceling our service. I would also hope that Azure Markeplace shows a warning, and requires another confirmation if one accidentally chooses CANCEL.

For what it's worth, we had a 30-day free trial since we had been using the free Bing Search API prior to it moving to Azure. I don't mind losing the free trial. I am mainly extremely disturbed that our service was cut off without any warning, and would like to know more details about what caused the problem.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Hello,

The way the upgrade and downgrade process works underneath is:

Your current subscription (to previous tier) is cancelled and you get subscribed to the new tier. This is what the "Are you sure" text box is trying to tell you.

It sound like the credit card you used for trial subscription expired and we could not use it to resubscribe to the new tier. So, we ended up canceling the previous one, but failing to create the new subscription.

This is not the best experience and we will try to fix it in upcoming releases. This should not happen unless your have any sort of credit card issues in the future.

Thanks,

Max