Why did Amazon remove itemized receipts in emails? Aren't we supposed to Obsess over Customers, not over Competitors?
Can someone explain why itemized receipts have been removed? The email receipts that Amazon sends now only have the order total. No info on products purchased, no info on price or sales tax, no info on seller, no info on quantity, category or applied discounts or payment methods. Just a meaningless order number and the total, basically. How is this Customer Obsession? If customers want to allow third parties to have access to their email, to datamine and provide more relevant services and notifications, who is Amazon to inhibit such choice? #misc #amazon #amazoncompetitors #amazonemail #amazonlp #lp #CustomerObsession
Saves on api calls when putting together the email details
That's a big fail on scalability analysis. Those calls are made once, and cached permanently. Instead we're forced to always use the website which has an industry-worst search engine. Then when you click "print receipt", the data is likely fetched for a second time, each time. I'm more likely to shop at places that introduce less friction and provide proper receipts. I only ever buy 3rd party items at Amazon, since they have a monopoly on fulfilment.
Not defending Amazon. Amazon has stopped being customer obsessed. Their return process started showing that a few months ago and I stopped buying from them. Canceled my prime membership Amazon teams are pushed to cut cost for frugality. A dev/pm/manager goes to a meeting, shows that they have removed calls to service X. That freed up 100 servers, which is $y a month. Not everyone will check their itemized receipts, so if 10% go back to website to download the receipts, they still saved money. All their email notifications have adapted this, so this is organized at higher level. When you get delivery emails or delayed delivery notifications they are missing item details. Basically they just format all the info in the SNS in nice format and send it to you. They removed all extra calls to services providing item details.
They also removed the portion of the site that allowed for downloading a detail receipt of purchases for a given time frame. Made reconciling budget easy. They initially removed the site's links and the eventually took it down altogether. Amazon wants you to spend money, not know where it went.
How am I supposed to get the sales tax credit on my income tax it I have no clue how much sales tax I paid on what categories? This is surprisingly anti consumer by a company claiming to be Customer Obsessed.
Amazon is not customer obsessed. They are obsessed with creating a pleasing experience so they can more easily part a customer from their money. This is part of that. I was annoyed as hell since it meant more legwork to reconcile the budget and figure out what was for the house vs gift vs the dog etc.
Google is also customer obsessed, so much so that they read all of the email their users receive and send. I think Amazon wanted to prevent Google from scraping customer purchasing information from emails.
That and to kneecap Shopify’s SHOP app, which also scrapes emails for shipping info and presumably purchase patterns.
Right, but that's Obsessing over Competitors, not over Customers. Customers don't care about Google scraping their Gmail. Else, you simply don't use Gmail. Gmail has less monopoly on email than Amazon on 3rd party shopping.
Lp is never the priority, profit is
Coz Google was reading that user data for free and profiting from it.
Because Google can't already parse who is searching for an item and who is going to amazon? Amazon could have just linked back to their own site and provided the same information to the customer. They didn't. Blaming Google is a smokescreen.
Again, that's Obsessing over Competitors, not over Customers. Personally, I think the value loss for customers is far greater over this change than the business add for Amazon over Google. BTW, does Gmail privacy policy even allow Google to scrape Gmail like that? They already infer a lot from Google Search, email is usually more of a private matter where they would not even be allowed by some regulators to simply datamine indiscriminately.
They want you on Amazon to see your receipt. That way you buy something. Nobody buys anything when checking their email.
Actually, they already include product recommendations. My own usage resulted to never bothering to open the emails I get from Amazon, since they're useless and pointless now. Amazon actually doesn't upsell from order history page, so it's a lost opportunity to upsell through emails to which customers would have a business need to come back to.
Email scraping
Mostly because they don’t want google or your email provider to get free data on your shopping habits. It’s customer obsession vs “fuck the other guys” and fuck the other guys win. We should add this as a leadership principle
They are obsessing pver customers by protecting order history from GMAIL
Instead they probably just sell it to Google so even if i don’t use gmail my privacy is violated
So, they protect me from my choice of the email provider? Why stop there? Are they going to review my order next time, and decide to not ship me the stuff I ordered because it's bad for me? Filter historical books due to wrong think?
Could be for privacy reasons. Email provider will know everything you are buying when itemized
If you don't trust your email provider with your order history, maybe switch the provider? Why do I have to go into the trouble of going to random websites to download receipts? Actually, noone else other than Amazon is doing this BS of hiding receipts from the customers.
They trust amazon email provider, they don't trust customers email provider