The secret life of Amazon orders

I really hate Amazon order confirmation & notification emails.  There, I said it.  If it sounds like I feel  strongly about them, it is because I do.

Less suck

How much do we order from Amazon?  Let's just say, more often than not, our family has a few orders in flight at any given time.  No big surprise here, and I know we are not alone.  Compulsive shoppers we are not, but when we do need or want something, we immediately reach for Amazon.  It's just too easy: the prices are usually competitive, and the shipping is free and reasonably quick - if you have Prime (although Prime delivery which used to be 2 days, now takes quite a bit longer - and the people are quite upset, with some even suing... but this is a separate story altogether).

The shopping experience is great, but the Amazon order email notifications are practically useless.  Did we order a 6 months supply of toilet paper?  Did my 12 year old just purchase an entire season of The Sex Lives of College Girls?  Don't look for the list of the actual items in the emails because they ain't there.  The notifications don't include any order details, aside from the order ID and a link. This is especially frustrating when you have more than one Amazon order in the works, like we do: from the email alone, it's impossible to determine which item has shipped, or is being delayed.  If you need to do that, or to even simply remember or confirm what you ordered, you have to click on the link to open the website or the app.



Queue the eye-roll from those dismayed by the bare display of privilege and entitlement.  To be clear, my world is not going to fall apart if I have to make that extra click.  But it is super annoying.  Most of us have a ton of stuff going on at any given time - work meetings, kid pickups and after school activities, doctor & vet appointments, car service, and the list goes on.  We have to make lots of quick decisions, and time is at a premium.  In a way, we've been spoiled by instant and detailed email and text notifications.  But there is a reason we love them - they help us be more efficient, and that counts for a lot in the daily grind.

Unlike most (all?) other vendors, Amazon does not include order details in the notifications.  Instead of being helpful, as they were presumably designed to be, they now require extra work to figure out which frigging order they reference.  And this makes my customer experience (or "CX", in Amazon and industry lingo) crappy.  Amazon prides itself on customer experience, so much so that Customer Obsession leads the list of its corporate leadership principles.  So, what gives?  Why are the email notifications from the world's most customer obsessed company so customer unfriendly?

Curiously, this is a somewhat recent development. At one point, the emails did include order details.  I, for one, can no longer even remember the time when that was the case, and I've been shopping on Amazon for years.  Judging by a quick online search, the change dates back to 2018 or 2019.  Because I never delete most emails (thank you, Gmail), I dug out a sample from 2018 to remind everyone how great it was back in the good old days:



So, why did the change happen?  There is no official answer from Amazon, from what I can see, but the going theory is that Amazon did it to thwart third-party scraping tools from harvesting the emails for valuable competitive and market information.  As a product manager, I get that (I think).  As a customer, I am annoyed AF.  And I am not the only one: just do a quick search for "amazon emails not showing order details" or read the passionate comments added to this blog post. 

Product manager's thoughts:

Protecting competitive information is important, especially for market-leading companies like Amazon.  If there is a clear and present danger to the business, it might move me to consider otherwise less than desirable changes to customer experience - if there are no alternatives.  The question typically is: how big of a change and an inconvenience does this introduce for the customers, are there easy enough workarounds, and what's the overall estimated negative impact to the business.

A simple rule of thumb to estimate the severity of the change is reach multiplied by impact.  Reach here is everyone - literally, every Amazon retail customer.  Impact, I would argue, is non-trivial - it's a significant detrimental change to one of the most visible and frequent elements of the Amazon shopping experience.  What's the risk here - meaning, will the customers shop less or even defect altogether?  Given Amazon's market position and its stickiness, unlikely.  So, while the change to the customer experience is quite unpleasant and pervasive, the Amazon team must have calculated that the threat of leaving their information out there for harvesting was greater than the risk of the change to the customer experience.

A smaller vendor would be less likely to take that risk.  Amazon has considerable market power, and that change, while frustrating, is unlikely to cause customer flight.  Want to see the actual details?  Click on the included link - which seems easy enough if you are already logged in to website or in the app, but a PIA if you are not.  Alternatively, you can use the mobile app which, unlike email, can send you verbose order notifications - this, however, is the case on mobile devices only.  Or just ignore the emails altogether and use the website or the app to track the status of your orders at all times.

More awesome

Are there any other options - to keep the customer experience great and protect the company information at the same time?  One thing comes to mind (also suggested by others) is replacing the plain text in the email with an image, which would be presumably harder to scrape.  The truth is, only marginally so.  Given the the widely available image recognition and text extraction tools, it's often a fairly straightforward software engineering exercise.  So, not really a viable alternative.  Does anyone have any other clever ideas?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The odds of buying lottery tickets in Georgia

Image
 Given the recent record lottery jackpots, who hasn't wondered "what if"?  Or secretly imagined themselves a winner, if for a brief second?  Even those of us who fully appreciate the cruel reality of incredibly small odds of winning have entertained the thought.  And as we know, you can't win if you don't play. Which was exactly what I set out to do, among millions of others seduced by the massive jackpots.  Except I kept forgetting to stop by a gas station or a convenience store to buy one.  To my rescue, the state of Georgia released a brand-new mobile app where one could not only check their numbers, but even purchase lottery tickets from their mobile device.  No more trips to the gas station, no more missed opportunities! Conveniently, the app offered me several options to fund my lottery account, Paypal among them:   The app connected to my Paypal account almost instantly, but when I attempted to add funds from it, the transaction suddenly failed with a crypt
Read more

AT&T rewards that aren't rewarding, part 2

Image
As promised, the most fun AT&T rewards adventure deserves its own story.  For other fun experiences leading up to this, see the earlier post. The mystery of the expiration date One of the cards had the expiration date of 12/2022.  Fast-forward to the end of the year - Christmas, New Years, the whole thing.  Admittedly, I was somewhat negligent in letting a balance linger on the card up to the very end.  But then on Dec 31st I remembered that I had some money burning my pocket.  Still time left, right?  This is where things got interesting.  I tried multiple different sites - Paypal, Amazon, Walmart - and in each case I was summarily rejected, informed that the expiration date was no good.  For a moment there, my semi-intoxicated New Year's Eve mind briefly wondered whether I was a victim of computer servers which were 3 hours ahead, and therefore thought we'd entered 2023.  But then I remembered: I was on the East Coast, and most servers were on the West Coast, meaning 3 ho
Read more

Paypal & the linking of a bank account

Image
Once in a while we have to link our bank account to an online service - say, to set up direct deposit, or pay utility bills.  it's a straightforward but annoying exercise. Every time I go through it, just like most sane people, I can never remember the bank's routing and account numbers and have to look them up.  To make sure we can't just link to some random account and take money from it, these services, thankfully, require us to prove that we have access to it.  The method to do that is as simple as it is clever: the service makes a couple of tiny deposits into the account, and asks us to tell it what those exact amounts were.  If our answer matches the deposits that were made, our access is confirmed, and we are good to go.  Otherwise, no transfers to or from that account are allowed. It's a road well traveled.  Every service does it more or less the same way, including Paypal - where I recently had to link a bank account. After completing the initial setup, I wai
Read more