HACKER Q&A
📣 westwooded

Why are my Amazon order emails so devoid of useful information?


Why do my amazon order details consist of:

"Thank you for shopping with us. We’ll send a confirmation when your items ship." Then it lists my order number, shipping address and amount paid.

Nowhere to be found is the product that I ordered. This is infuriating because now I cannot search for orders in email without going to Amazon's closed wall system.

Any way to change this?

  👤 WaltPurvis Accepted Answer ✓
I use Gmail, so I'm quite happy that Amazon doesn't automatically share the details of my purchases with Google.

Furthermore, it seems weird to be upset (let alone infuriated) about having to use "Amazon's closed wall system" to search your past orders; you have to use "Amazon's closed wall system" to shop for items and to place orders and to do literally everything else related to buying things on Amazon. I don't even see how it makes sense to talk about a "closed wall system"——as if that's a bad thing——when it comes to Amazon's retail store.

👤 Aperocky
They probably have a async worker picking from the $BILLING table to send these automated emails.

Meanwhile, the system cannot add the detailed description likely because: accessing order item would need your personal credential, which only you would have. Extra db calls would cause more time delays and strain on the system.

I don’t work for the retail side of Amazon, but that would be my educated guess of the situation.

👤 abricot
They want you to log in to the site every time you need any info.

An algorithm has probably told them that you would be 0.0047% more likely to order something again.

..alternatively it's so that the order process is slightly more secure as the email is not secure communication.

👤 drewbug
Because this way you can't use their emails against them
👤 generalpass
Will Amazon send emails to mail servers with no encryption?