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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.)
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.
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 ?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Likely to prevent google from collecting shopping habit signals to sell ads targeting to.
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.
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.
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).
Oh I know why they did it. I am still furious that I am yet again getting a worse experience.
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.
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.)
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.
What's the purpose of the emails then?
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 ?
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
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
Can't trust Bezos, but also can't trust AI spam. Whatever shall we do?
Can we put Bezos on a PIP?