Users have started to notice that Amazon does not include the items you’ve ordered in its confirmation and shipment emails. One Daring Fireball, John Gruber owners whether it is a bid to stop others scraping the data.
Amazon no longer puts a list of items in order confirmation and shipment notice emails. Almost certainly they’re doing this to thwart email-scraping data harvesters from obtaining information about Amazon sales. All sorts of companies harvest this info, and people volunteer to let them do it (including Edison Mail, the iOS mail client whose recent egregious bug granted full access to email accounts to random other users — at least they’re up front about it in their “how we use data” statement). Edison is far from alone in this — there’s an entire cottage industry of email clients and “tools” whose entire business model is based on scraping their users’ email for e-commerce trends. So, from the Department of This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, Amazon has responded by removing product information from its emails.
Check It Out: Amazon No Longer Including Item Details in Order and Shipment Emails
As if we weren’t spending too much time searching Amazon annd being bombarded with ads, now we have to click through links in emails with vague descriptions of what we purchased to decide which of the 3-4 messages received for each purchase can be deleted from our overflowing inboxes.
This sucks! I now have to open the Amazon app just to see what the notification THEY send me is referring to. For someone like me that orders items almost daily, this is a true pain.