My annual renewal used someone else's credit card

Yesterday I got a call from my mother wondering if I had heard of IMDbPro. She thought she had been scammed for $180. I told her I had heard of the site, and that it was legit, so I was keen to look into her problem. It turns out that the charge was for MY OWN annual renewal! I had no idea why it was taken from her card!

So it turns out, my renewal anniversary was yesterday, and my primary card on Amazon didn't have enough to cover the $180. I got no email reminder so I had no idea the payment was due, so the balance was low. Anyway, what IMDb do in this case is they look through any other cards you've ever added to your Amazon wallet over the years and tries to charge one of them instead!

This is pretty insane really. I had added her card to my Amazon like 2 years ago to pay for some Christmas gifts. That seems to be perfectly ok with Amazon - the name and address are different - but it's wild that IMDb think that this scenario is legit. I had to explain to my mother that I'd pay her back.

They have a small subtitle on the account page as follows:

If we are unable to complete your order with the payment method associated with your subscription, you authorize us to update your subscription with another payment method you have on file.

But I'm making this post to say that I think that leads to awful customer experience for the poor "victim" who has their card charged with no indication of what the cause is

You can do better. Any of these scenarios would be much better customer experience:

1. try take payment the primary account a second time
2. Send an email letting them know that the payment failed
3. Send an email reminder that the payment is due! Please do this, but I understand that this would be a business decision and it would probably increase the number of people cancelling their renewal, ie the people who forgot that they were subscribed.
   1. At a minimum, send an email receipt after the payment is made, showing the last 4 digits of the card.
4. And most importantly, don't use a secondary payment card that has a completely different name and address to the person on the account!

I'm sure there's a better and more ethical way to handle this. I've noticed a bunch of Google results about people complaining about spurious IMDbPro charges on their account - this would have been my mother if she hadn't called me by chance! Seriously, think about it - I would have had zero notification, she would have had zero indication that it was me, and it would have been her job to chase you to query the payment. When in fact it's my responsibility to pay it, but equally it's your responsibility to be transparent.