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Amazon now hides all customer reviews on products

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Amazon now hides all customer reviews on products

#21

Post by VCFundedGenYer »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #6

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.

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.

Re: Amazon now hides all customer reviews on products

#23

Post by bmitc »

VCFundedGenYer wrote: post #21
0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #6

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.

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.

What's the purpose of the emails then?

Re: Amazon now hides all customer reviews on products

#24

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

VCFundedGenYer wrote: post #21
0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #6

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.

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.

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.

Re: Amazon now hides all customer reviews on products

#25

Post by patch_cable »

VCFundedGenYer wrote: post #21
0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #6

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.

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.)

Re: Amazon now hides all customer reviews on products

#26

Post by otterley »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #16
0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #6

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.

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).

Re: Amazon now hides all customer reviews on products

#27

Post by kay_o »

VCFundedGenYer wrote: post #22

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.

Re: Amazon now hides all customer reviews on products

#28

Post by Postosuchus »

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.

Re: Amazon now hides all customer reviews on products

#29

Post by tonymet »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #6

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.

Likely to prevent google from collecting shopping habit signals to sell ads targeting to.

Re: Amazon now hides all customer reviews on products

#30

Post by tonymet »

VCFundedGenYer wrote: post #22

This is false. I was just on Amazon and none of what you said was true. The filter options and reviews are all there

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.
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