Why your Amazon order confirmation emails have become so unhelpful

Even if you look at your purchase history now they have intentionally destroyed that too. What size shoe did you buy 3 years ago? Too bad we are not telling you!

The purchase/shipped/etc email was the lifeline to tracking your Amazon spending and exactly what you bought. Now that is impossible. It's similar to a business refusing to give you a proper receipt and should be likely illegal.

What 3rd party companies I let hoover up my Amazon purchase emails is none of their business.

I went and looked at order confirmation emails from 2019 and confirmed my memory that back then they didn’t list what items I ordered (but did a few years before). At the time I figured this change was intended to fight against Paribus, a startup that would scan your email and automatically request compensation for late Amazon deliveries.

But then I looked at emails last year and Amazon was sending item names after order again. So it seems like this practice has changed multiple times.

There is a secondary, more nefarious purpose, near as I can tell. I constantly order items from Amazon that say "arriving tomorrow/Tuesday/etc." then the item invariably doesn't actually arrive when it was supposed to, often outside of Prime 2 day shipping even if a Prime item. But when you go to view the order online it has helpfully updated the arrival date to the new day. They push it as many times as they want to, then act dumb if you call them on it.

I've taken to screenshotting the initial shipping date, but it doesn't make much difference. I don't know what "Prime" even means anymore.

And I live in SF so it's not like there is some logistics problem with my location, either.

I ordered something yesterday, expecting it today, and the confirmation email contains the actual product images and title (albeit trimmed).

I wish there was a way to put another phone number under Account / Notifications / Shipping and delivery. Without adding somebody to a "household" or installing apps, I just want someone else to know a package was delivered, and it should be brought inside.

Good example of where user agents will need to be more proactive in areas like this to collect and store information useful to the user. In the accelerating "optimization" of online commerce (and discourse) more relations will become aggressively adversarial.

Looks like you haven't seen what they've done with Order Search. Being a customer since 1994 (yes, when they just came out as a neat way to buy books online), my order history has been an invaluable reference allowing me to find that thing I bought 5 years ago, its specific and the price I paid. Now, instead of a good old substring search, they do some kind of insane fuzzy search which comes up with hundreds of absolutely irrelevant results. They've made it completely unusable.

But I'm sure a good bunch of people got promoted for "enhancing" the search with AI...

The website needs an actual orders/cancellations page too as well as a page that clearly shows which items were shipped together in the same box (rather than arriving on the same day). The "Your Orders" page is a stream of items, and that can make it difficult to figure out which items came from where, in case of an issue.

Whenever I order anything from Amazon (or anywhere else online), I Print-to-PDF a copy of the order receipt and keep it on my own computer; I've been doing this since 2010.

It's especially useful for recovering info about items that are no longer carried (or from places that have gone out of business) and thus have no webpage any more.

I've been unsubscribing from a lot of mailing lists the past week because my email was getting cluttered.

I noticed many Amazon emails, not just the 'ads' but also the order confirmation, order shipped, rate your order, etc emails related to a purchase. Honestly, never look at any of them because I know most will arrive either same day or within the next 1-2 days and I don't care for rating my orders.

It's only when something hasn't arrived within that timeframe that I check the app/website, both of which are much more useful.

I have seen the same with bank emails for example not listing a bill balance or deposit amount.

Kudos to those companies that are implementing this.

Enshittification.

You know folks, it is perfectly doable to live you life without buying on amazon.

After checking every box to never get any email from Amazon.com, I followed-up with a catch-all auto-delete rule for the domain. That was 10 years ago. I have experienced zero issues with their services. As a nice bonus, I'm immediately aware of anyone trying to phish me via Amazon orders.