How about just stop buying shit from Amazon? My confirmation emails haven’t been existing for the last 2 years.
I currently have a different problem with Amazon. I ordered a graphics card four weeks ago. No high end thing, a simple one with a price tag of €132. They confirmed sending it, then something happened, and shipping was delayed. I got the offer to cancel my order. Nope. I want that card. That’s why I ordered it. They currently have 10 of them in stock, but now priced €199. If I would cancel and order new i would have to pay the new price.
Yeah. Shit like this sorta reminds me of the reports I’ve been hearing about warranty replacements on drives. They don’t send you a replacement because that drive is worth twice what it was so they refund your money you originally paid. It’s almost like it’s turning into eBay and the highest bid.
Fuck amazon, but also this kinda sounds like the beginnings of ai companies fighting for control and I have a small sliver of hope that they will just destroy each other.
Sees headline: is it ai?
Sees uri: looks like it.
Reads article: what can I say but yikes.
In May Google unveiled a shopping cart that works across various merchants that would eventually be integrated into Gmail as well,
No thanks, sounds like a privacy nightmare. Not to mention probably pushing for more consumerism, which no thanks to that too.
Amazon has also been plugging away at AI-powered shopping features of its own, like price tracking and automatic purchasing. Alexa for Shopping is built into the Amazon app, and shoppers can query the chatbot for product recommendations and comparisons
Yes, let’s let the hallucinating plagiarism machine buy stuff and recommend stuff and track pricing data. Oh, did I mention the planet killing chat box is owned by Amazon, the place that makes money on selling you shit? what can possibly go wrong??
Let alone the predictive pricing. "Oh you usually run out of shampoo mid month? Well guess what, shampoo prices double on the 10th and just happen to drop back down on the 25th. "
Google has had a feature variant of this since at least 2014. Back when Google Now was a thing (before LLM’s took off) there was a significant outcry about privacy because Google was scraping your emails to tell you when your packages shipped and when they would be delivered, to remind you when your flight was and what time you needed to leave for the airport and if your gate changed etc.
The thing that bothers me about this is, at that point it could be a opt in thing (on the email providers side), and it shouldn’t be up to Amazon to use “customer protection” as a reason to enshittify their services so that they can continue to be anti-competitive.
“the user is signing in with an email address from a company whose terms they accepted - let’s get in the way and tell the user only we get to do those things”
AI won’t help for pricing anyway because the company actively tries to get you to buy the less quality more expensive products, as outlined in a John Oliver episode.
Oh no, doesn’t help you for pricing. The company! To figure out just how much they can charge for just how shitty a thing!
Yeah sorry I knew that, obviously it does help pricing, their pricing, dynamic pricing coming to you soon!
CCTV cameras will know who everyone is and digital tags can give a price based on their metrics, or online with different prices. It’s already started. Consumer Reports outed Instacart for doing it online already, a firm that operates shopping carts on multiple websites as a vendor.
I think this is the article: https://www.consumerreports.org/money/questionable-business-practices/instacart-ai-pricing-experiment-inflating-grocery-bills-a1142182490/
The future fucking sucks.
*Gives A.I. agent access to credit card*
I need a tungsten cube
I really wish more people would include short summaries in their posts so I don’t have to read 12 paragraphs of bloat on a heavy webpage.
”As customers shop with us more frequently, including on their phones, and use the ‘Your Orders’ page in the Amazon app to get real-time, consolidated order details and delivery status, we’ve simplified several order-related emails to direct customers to our app and website for the latest information on their orders,” spokesperson Maxine Tagay said in an email. “This also reduces customer information shared outside the Amazon app and website to further improve customer privacy.”
In other words: It’s a way to hedge against the DoorDash problem by hiding the meaty information on Amazon’s properties, and to keep customers visiting the retailer directly.
Yet again it’s another thing AI is ruining and another way for companies to claw back value for themselves at the expense of their users.
Does the article explain what the “DoorDash problem” is?
Not adequately. They simply say there’s some vague “need” to get people to visit the app/site, but they don’t outline WHY that’s harmful to the company if people can get the information directly.
My guess? It’s about data protection. Amazon doesn’t want Google via gmail to learn exactly what you’re buying. By holding it in house they can better target you than anyone else, and also sell this “high value data” to data brokers
They don’t care about email scraping (which would be illegal)
They simply want people to install the app because it exfiltrates a lot of tasty data to them.
An email might “only” contain ab invisible image to track views and unique links for tracking clicks, while if the user opens the app they way more data.
From the APK I see they can get stuff like
- All the contacts of the user, all email addresses and phone numbers
- GPS location
- Camera and photos
- Microphone
- Your phone number, your device IMEI and your unique advertising id, for cross tracking you better around other sites
- Send push notifications for FOMO promotions like “OMG it’s the last one buy now before it gets sold out!!!”
Most of this scraping (like Google indexing your emails) is legal if the user is informed (an in EU if they can disable it)
The team problem the article hints at iis doordash and Amazon claims the customer relationships and hides the customer from the real company that actually made the sale. They make themselves a middleman to displace others as much as possible and use their size to manipulate the market in their favor (like demanding higher margins than other retailers)
Yes
fuck amazon. i literally just built an email scraper so i can use this exact email as a way to understand where my disposable amazon spending is going. because of course they don’t offer any way to export your purchases to analyze your spending.
I hate this.
I’ve always kept my “ordered” and “delivered” emails in order to have a searchable database of what I ordered and when.
Without the item name, making that discovery is a lot more challenging.
Same. Pretty often I want to pull up the specs on some computer part, but these days nothing is clearly labeled with a part number. I don’t think my motherboard has one at all, certainly none where I can see. I would just search my email for “motherboard” and the most recent result was probably the one I wanted.
Ever since I realised that corporations are allowed to engage in fraud, and a litany of other crimes, without consequence I started archiving things directly using a combination of the SingleFile browser extension and full page screenshots, placing them in a web-archive folder.
Every time I purchase anything I save the product listing and order page, along with all associated info, naming all files based on the date of the purchase; the larger the purchase the more I’ll save (product page, warranty, user manuals, etc), and sometimes even a note.md file to document specifics (filter changes, spare parts and part numbers, etc).
I also use this method to snapshot various account pages or interactions like web chat; pretty much anything that future me could possibly need to reference.
It comes in handy extremely often.
Yeah I used it to manage my finances. In my banking app it just shows up as:
Amazon $24
Amazon $12
Amazon $16Before, I checked the emails to label and tag the transactions according to what they actually were: electronics, furniture, etc. Now I have to log in and track down that one hidden page that splits your purchases into actual transactions instead of one infinite scrolling list of items, because Amazon will group the purchases seemingly arbitrarily based on it’s own shipping algorithm.
They made the entire UX hostile just to spite A.I. users. Not the first time they’ve done something similar; I’m getting pretty tired of their shit. In fact, I think I’m going to try some alternatives in my country and see if they’re better to use.
Lmao, Amazon is worried that google and all the other competitors will scrape their information and make money off it. “Yes AI is amazing, but not like thaaaaaaat!” They’re trying to out dirty each other.
Thats what I was thinking, since now they all compete against each other we can expect everything to get shittier as more walled gardens go up.
Which is stupid because it’s the equivalent of saying “you can’t send someone to Walmart to buy an item for you. That should be illegal!”
Amazon is the shop, I go to when I can’t find it literally anywhere else.
The search is dysfunctional. The shipping information assumes a Prime subscription. There is constantly some try-hard upsell-advertising. And Amazon is usually not even competitive on price. The emails don’t even matter - I download the invoices.Don’t forget the fact that you absolutely, positively cannot trust the quality of the item that will arrive. At this point, you’re much more likely to get some third party knock off with a lot of popular items.
Usability-reducing features like this do me a favor by giving me yet another reason to use Amazon less and less.
If you order via AliExpress, chances are the quality is the same or better. It just takes longer to arrive. But at least you won’t have to gamble if you receive a new or already used item
And they are 100% using AI to make the classifications. Last weekend I ordered a biscuit joiner and a pack of biscuits to go with it. The joiner got labeled a tool, and the biscuits got labeled “arts and crafts”.
I hate this change so fucking much that as soon as it went into effect I spent a good 30 minutes looking around my account settings for a way to switch it back. Have you visited your Amazon account settings recently? It’s a nightmare to try to find ANYTHING.
Well, they don’t need AI to fuck things up. That they could do way before that.
I once looked for an electronic part. I entered the part number, and got a crazy amount of irrelevant options listed, like female hygiene products, vases, clothing, and, somewhere in the list, the chip I was looking for.
Just for fun, I clicked some of those other articles and searched the page for the part number. No matches whatsoever. I don’t understand what made that algorithm presenting completely irrelevant stuff when there was one article in the list that matched my search term.
That’s so weird. I haven’t gotten any of these vague confirmation emails. Oh, that’s right. I remember why. Because I don’t buy a thing from that fucking oligarch’s website.
Same, but it takes effort. Even when items aren’t Amazon exclusives, Amazon still contractually requires the seller to give them the best price, so we all still pay the Amazon tax. Also, even if you order direct from the manufacturer’s website (for the ones that still have a website instead of just a Facebook page), it’s often shipped or fulfilled by Amazon. Or, if you find a decent alternative store like jet.com or woot.com, Amazon just buys them.
I do this thing where if I need something, I go to a store and buy it. It has resulted in a lot less buying of useless stuff that I didn’t really need and ends up just taking up space. YMMV
I do that when I can, but local selection is often pretty limited.
Fair enough and I’m sorry if I sounded judgy. I I know it doesn’t apply to everyone, but I think a major reason for Amazon’s success is that they’ve made acquiring things too convenient. A lot of people (I know I did) fall into the trap of over-consumption. I’ve come to conclude that spending my money ought to come with a little friction.
No offense taken, I completely agree.
It’s a damn good trap, and they make it work bafflingly well.
I can get up, get dressed, commute to a store, buy the item I need and commute back home, or I can push 3 buttons on my phone and have the item delivered to me in a few hours for 35% less than it would have cost at the store, without the added fees for travel.
… Ah, fuck, I’m one of the Wall-E universe people, aren’t I?
Very proud of u
What about when you purchase an item and then 24 hours later, you get an email to purchase the item you’ve already purchased.
I’ve wondered that for years, email was/is a privacy nightmare even before google got in the way. I wish more companies reconsidered what they’re sending via email.
They could let users register a PGP pubkey and encrypt their emails, which would also avoid third parties harvesting data from them.
Trying to get people on the app?
Nah. Trying to keep our order histories away from competitors and analysis.
emails
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