Amazon now hides all customer reviews on products | Hacker News Reader

Amazon now hides all customer reviews on products

86 pointstonymet52 comments

Amazon now hides nearly all product reviews . Filtering and ordering are disabled . Only the top 5-10 are shown . To opt out, a 5 day email request is required

Here is an example of the UI for members of the experiment

https://x.com/stillmisanthro1/status/2092441592242028986

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Amazon has also changed their email receipts to be worthless. Previously, you would get the product name and price paid, giving you a minimal record sufficient for tracking. Now you get an email that says N items, broadly categorized (housewares, pets, clothing) and no pricing information.

Clearly a customer focused decision.

This one infuriates me to no end. On credit card bills amazon orders show up as random garbage strings in the description. I had systems that would read these emails and pull out the product data so that I can feed it into my finance tracking system. Now I can't do anything.

This also frustrates me, I vibe-coded [0] a chrome extension that reads the data from Amazon's website (read orders and purchases, which are different things...) and then matches them against the YNAB entries and then updates the memo line in YNAB with the name of the item(s) (after running the item name through a small LLM, haiku, to clean up amazon-speak into something reasonable).

This has been working well for me overall.

It's not open source (or paid), it's just for me and I'm not looking to maintain or support it but it should be easy to replicate. It does require I go to Amazon on my desktop and click the extension and tell it to "Sync" but that's easy enough and it makes my budgeting way easier.

[0] I did this over 1.5 years ago (Jan 2025) so it's probably even easier now, I wrote it with Aider and it cost $27.81 in API credits (this was before Claude Code/coding subscriptions). The only reason I know the cost so exactly is that I had started to write a blog post about it but abandoned it.

Quicken Desktop (yes, it still exists) just added this as a new feature as well. It's pretty nice.

your credit card bills are super heavily data mined. I think what they're doing is fine.

For a long time, it was actually even worse: they obfuscated the product name, and added other products they wanted you to buy. So when you searched your email for practically anything, all sorts of Amazon garbage would come back.

Someone explained how it relates to their AI shopping plans. Don't actually remember how.

I remember reading they actively prevent AI agents from using their site or being able to track purchases. So congratulations, the uselessness for tracking is the point.

This is to protect their data on you. E-mailing you specifics is handing your purchase history directly to Google and Microsoft (at least for the 90% of the population that use Gmail/Outlook). They would rather sell that than give it away for free.

Oh I know why they did it. I am still furious that I am yet again getting a worse experience.

That shouldn't be Amazon's unilateral decision to make, though. They could have made that behavior optional, and if they were truly as Customer-Obsessed as they used to be, they would have (and they would also have observed that customers did not like the new behavior and reacted to that accordingly).

I think you are getting downvoted for speaking truth because of first sentence which should be changed to "This is to MOAT their data on you". "protection" is invalid word.

Protection is the correct word. I said to "protect their data", not "protect your data", which conveys the same thing as your proposed correction without being grammatically incorrect. Moat is not a verb.

Actually moat can most certainly be used as a verb. Ex They planned to moat the fortress for extra security.

No, sorry, this is a positive change that was overdue for years. Gmail (and likely other email providers) was scraping the contents of the email to build a list of your purchases and it was not possible to delete items or clear it.

What's the purpose of the emails then?

By this logic, nothing can ever be shared by email. Else someone (user included) might scrape some value from it.

If it is truly for my benefit, they could let me opt in or out of the behavior. I truly derive value from being able to search the local copy of my email to track purchases.

It’s my choice to use (or not use) Gmail. What data I share with them in exchange for their service is non of Amazon’s business. (If Amazon wanted to make this feature opt-in, sure, whatever.)

I host my own email and I think this change sucks

Likely to prevent google from collecting shopping habit signals to sell ads targeting to.

It used to be the case with Amazon India. Now my Gmail shows my fish food will arrive in 2 days.

For those saying it’s to protect you from Google’s surveillance, I’ll say a couple things:

1. It redacts emails even to my personal domain.

2. Multiple Amazon reps have told me this is a common customer complaint and there’s no way to opt out of it. If it really were altruistic, Amazon would let you opt out.

PS: maybe I’m not in the loop yet but the first item I checked shows at least a hundred customer reviews on some sort of infinite scroll.

I haven't seen this yet. Never used the app - I use the mobile site usually while logged in (but not always). Unfortunately a few features are missing (like being able to see all items for some reason by a specific seller) but otherwise it works well.

Is this you on X or did you link to a random post ?

It’s an example on X of a UI experiment that I’m in

Hard to know how to feel about this. Bots and such have really ruined the value of customer reviews. The best that can be said is they don't work as intended. The question is whether Amazon can actually fix this problem rather than continuing band-aid over it.

they only care about preventing customer data escaping their grasp

> Bots and such have really ruined the value of customer reviews.

This is not true. Bots and such have ruined the value of ratings aggregations. Individual reviews are still useful because you can always find some that you can tell are not bots

You can, but you can never be strictly certain that you haven't been duped. At least for me, that uncertainty does a lot of work.

It looks like Amazon is starting to hide some reviews to protect against data scraping bots, and in some cases it is affecting real (non-bot) customers.

Were you signed in when you got the message? All of the sorting / filtering / search options are showing up fine for me (as a signed in user).

When I clicked “see more reviews” while signed out it prompted me to sign in

That's been the case for years.

I see it while signed in on all devices (web desktop, iOS, iPad web)

This happened to me starting yesterday. Customer support was no help. Making me seriously consider exploring alternatives to Amazon.

This is both on the app and using the website on my computer.

same experience here. I clicked "send email" and no action was taken. then contacted CS text chat support and they didn't seem to have much insights. they "opened a ticket"

Amazon replied :

Hello,

Thank you for your request to see more customer reviews.

Your request has been approved, and you should now see more customer reviews.

Thanks for choosing Amazon. ©2026 Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. Amazon and all related marks are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates, Amazon.com, Inc. 410 Terry Avenue N., Seattle, WA 98109.

This is false. I was just on Amazon and none of what you said was true. The filter options and reviews are all there

Presume this is an experiment or phased rollout.

I was just on Amazon and only the first page of reviews are visible if logged in and no reviews are visible if logged out.

edit: It seems badly done too as the (140) count next to the stars still links to the review section below the description's anchor but simply does nothing onclick due to the fact that the whole destination div is gone.

they broke a lot with the reviews for this experiment. e.g. filter by stars no longer works, but the link to it is active.

I can't tell if they're trying to fix it with slop now but clicking the number of reviews now jumps below the description. To nothing.

Things are going great

It’s active on my account, and on the X example. It’s likely an experiment. I contacted CS and they need 5 days to respond.

Hmm... Is it an experiment? I'm seeing all reviews both on the web and in the app (Android phone).

Having said so, I am not hopeful. Amazon has gone the enshittification route with the gusto few companies have. And they've been actively (and gleefully) making some of the most useful features near useless. This can be seen most pointedly with order history search. Whereas in the past searching for a string brought up the past orders based on string match, now trying to search for a given term brings up gobs of past orders with items having absolutely no relevance to that search term. My cynical theory here is that someone "improved" order search by bolting on "AI."

It pains me a lot. I've been a fiercely loyal Amazon customer since 1994 and for a long time they've been the most customer-obsessed company out there. I can't even describe how different things are now.

I’m guessing it’s an experiment, since some customers still see the old behavior . I’m in the no-reviews experiment, and so is the twitter post.

Have you already brought your country through laziness and convenience to a state where you are subordinate to Amazon?

Don't you have other e-commerce sites?

i don’t follow.

They make it so extremely easy to return that I've never actually bothered to read reviews

Sometimes that’s not an option, e.g. buying snow chains before a ski trip. Often the reviews reveal product limitations that aren’t specified in the listing.

Years ago I bought a Dell XPS and an electric kettle, even though they both had a number one complaint on reviews (XPS: coil whine, kettle: plastic lid crazing).

Both products are still available and it seems they both have the same complaints from a decade ago.

"Dell continues to treat mild-to-moderate coil whine as an inherent characteristic of components rather than a manufacturing defect".

Leave a review to help others, but don't expect manufacturers to care about even egregious issues.

I agree reviews aren’t perfect. and I’ve had many good products with poor reviews, and vice-versa

Can't trust Bezos, but also can't trust AI spam. Whatever shall we do?

Can we put Bezos on a PIP?

PIP's are for useful people who might go against the flow, not for Bezos like.

He's not CEO anymore

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