Can't trust Bezos, but also can't trust AI spam. Whatever shall we do?
Amazon now hides all customer reviews on products
11–20 of 54 posts
Re: Amazon now hides all customer reviews on products
#12Amazon 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.
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Re: Amazon now hides all customer reviews on products
#13Amazon 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.
Someone explained how it relates to their AI shopping plans. Don't actually remember how.
Re: Amazon now hides all customer reviews on products
#14Amazon 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.
Re: Amazon now hides all customer reviews on products
#15Can't trust Bezos, but also can't trust AI spam. Whatever shall we do?
Can we put Bezos on a PIP?
Re: Amazon now hides all customer reviews on products
#16Amazon 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 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.
Re: Amazon now hides all customer reviews on products
#17Amazon 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.
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.
Re: Amazon now hides all customer reviews on products
#18Amazon 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 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.
Re: Amazon now hides all customer reviews on products
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Quicken Desktop (yes, it still exists) just added this as a new feature as well. It's pretty nice.
Re: Amazon now hides all customer reviews on products
#20They make it so extremely easy to return that I've never actually bothered to read reviews