I think we deserve to hear from Google about this one. Unless we have already?
IIRC, that's why Amazon purchase emails are utterly useless now. They realized Google was getting their precious customer data via Gmail, so they cut off the flow years ago.
It's another example of how the modern economy has many consumer-hostile incentives that have actually led to regressions rather than improvements.
I liked getting an email with the item, price, shipping, etc. Now it’s just an order number and shipping notice and I have to click on the order to figure out what items are coming. Particularly fun when I order 6 items and they get split into 6 shipments. Or just trying to keep track of my dozens of Amazon orders.
I switched to Walmart as they send useful product updates.
It's the opposite.
Amazon wants you to click back into the store to buy things. One way to do that is forcing you to view orders in the store instead of your email inbox. They care more about that than Google seeing your purchase history.
Also, that’s a great state of things today… Amazon has to make their product worse because Google won’t ever stop siphoning.
I still have a Gmail, but I’m properly compelled to kill it, finally.
I work for another online retailer and have been involved in discussions about this same topic (order information in emails we send), and the way we looked at it was that:
- Gmail collects this data from emails
- The overwhelming majority of users are unaware of this data collection
- If we included the data in the email, while knowing that Gmail was collecting it and knowing that most users are not aware, that was tantamount to us just willingly handing over the data to Google without the users' consent
Because of this, we asked ourselves if users would likely feel upset with us willingly handing over data to Google without consent, and we decided that yes they would. So we made a trade off to not include that data in emails because we thought that was more important than the hit to UX we would take from making the emails less informative.
Either way we had to make a decision on behalf of our customers and we knew that no matter which one we chose, we knew some portion of users would be unhappy and decided to go with the more privacy-conscious choice.
I do see a decent argument for companies being a little bit more conservative about what information they put in emails when this kind of information collection is largely invisible to the general public. It's just important to balance that against data silo worries by making it easy for customers to export their data and hook purchase confirmations up to other services that users might actually want to have access.
I'm not convinced Amazon makes these kinds of decisions out of a concern for user privacy (especially since Amazon isn't actually consistent about hiding this information in their emails as far as I can tell), but I'm sure some retailers are.
Not providing intricate details about your purchases in email is a privacy-enhancing feature, given that probably most of their customers are using gmail.
They can fix their privacy issues on their platform, I want my email receipts.
Whereas that is pretty easy with any sort of email client.
The report contains far more information than you can scrape from their old order emails, including: Date, ID, Title, Category, ASIN/ISBN, UNSPSC, Condition, Seller, List Price, Purchase Price, Quantity, Payment Instrument, Shipping Address, Carrier, and more
It was just in the past week or so that I noticed that it's back.
It's on your main account page under "Download order reports"
I noticed they stopped including product details in emails a few years ago, didn't click until reading it now that they're doing it to prevent data mining. Kind of makes sense if you think about it, but maybe they should have an option for that for people that self-host their e-mail or use privacy-focused providers.
Amazon used to let you at least download a CSV for a date range, but the don't even let you do that anymore!
Yeah, and there's nothing you can do. I don't even use gmail anymore, and the emails are still garbage. I think for awhile they used to include a truncated name of one of the products in the order, but it looks like they even removed that (sometime around August 2019, based on my emails).
Unrelated observation: in my original comment I added a second paragraph noting that this regression was due to the incentives caused by modern capitalism (and it is: owners trying to extract maximum value for themselves, even if that means hurting their customers), and it immediately started getting downvoted. Then I change "capitalism" to "economy" and it started going up again. Some people are really sensitive. It must be blasphemy to criticize the invisible hand and the wisdom of the owners ti guides. I guess right is whatever they do.
I didn't realize why, but it's always annoyed me how little info is on Amazon's order confirmation emails, forcing you to click the link.
This is why!
To be honest, I actually think it's probably more privacy-conscious to eliminate as much information as possible (but no more) from these kinds of emails. While I suppose Amazon is concerned with competitive behaviors from Google, I'm more concerned that Google or any other actor with access to my email could look through my purchasing list, or my library reading list, or...
Email is an insecure and non-private medium, but we often use it for items that require some level of security or privacy. I'd prefer if more companies held that information closely.
But that makes them useless for what they are, especially the shipping ones: "You made three orders recently, one shipped. If you actually want to know which one (and you haven't memorized your order IDs) click here!"
This is actually a pretty annoying regression for me, because I buy things from many sites and have no way to search my overall order history anymore.
> Email is an insecure and non-private medium, but we often use it for items that require some level of security or privacy. I'd prefer if more companies held that information closely.
It is, but there's no better system and ruining email doesn't solve that privacy problem (e.g. Amazon may sell this information). At a minimum, it should be a setting so people can opt to get useful emails if they want to make that tradeoff.
If I don't want Google to have any access then I'll use a different provider or self host my email. If I want to publish all of my emails publicly that's also my decision.
on the other hand I don't like having stores advertise to me online because Google slurps up my purchase data.
for me the privacy - or the sandboxing if Amazon sells the data - is worth the inconvenience. but that's like just my opinion, dude
Google has been found to lie and play dirty over and over again throughout their existence. You'd be a fool to think they don't even scan it. For "safety reasons", and oops, the contents of your email have accidentally been logged and stored, what a shame.
I see Amazon as doing something similar, but less targeted at gmail specifically.
Would be nice if Amazon only made their e-mails to Google addresses (Gmail or otherwise) useless.
"You bought a toilet? Would you like another 4 toilets?"
I mean, ffs, maybe recommend a bidet or installation tools.
Google literally buys a copy of most people's credit card transaction data.
>Google has been able to track your location using Google Maps for a long time. Since 2014, it has used that information to provide advertisers with information on how often people visit their stores. But store visits aren’t purchases, so, as Google said in a blog post on its new service for marketers, it has partnered with “third parties” that give them access to 70 percent of all credit and debit card purchases.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/05/25/242717/google-no...
Downside is Gmail search is a lot better than Fastmail's. But otherwise it's worked great.