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.
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.
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
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.
Amazon absolutely fucking sucks
For me its quite funny to discuss Amazon… I live in a country where Amazon does operate, but its not a main thing at all. I dont think they even have their own delivery vans here, its all done via third parties because it doesnt make sense enough to have their own systems for the 43 people who use it.
Some time ago I was discussing Amazon with an American and said that I have never needed Amazon for anything in my life. Then they asked me “well where do you go when you need dog food, a new drill bit set and bathroom cleaning products” and I just said “to the shopping center 700m away from me?” I dont know if Americans have forgot that malls are a thing, or have malls disappeared from there completely, but based on that guys response, it was like I was talking about going to a different planet. Some people are way too deep into these things… Its pretty concerning, in my opinion.
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
Anyone else remember when they used to give you a refund if it didn’t come in 2 days? Lol
Yea that was to kill small businesses that couldn’t compete.
And now that they’ve done that (or acquired them), poof! You get it when you get it! A familiar pattern.
My favorite is I ordered dog food. It was scheduled for 2 weeks (with prime). It arrived next day. Amazon still said it wasn’t shipped yet. To this day “expected delivery date is currently unknown” in the Amazon app. I ordered it in May. It does give me the option to request refund but I haven’t done it as the food was actually delivered and this seems like some employee forgot to scan the sticker at some point.
At the beep, it has been 7 months and 19 days and Amazon still has not found my camera.
Beep.
I know where it is. You know where it is. Amazon shipped it loose in its manufacturer’s packaging which plainly broadcast “steal me” to the entire universe and their third party totally-not-an-employee contractor delivery driver stole it. But they’ll totally refund me any day now. Juuuuust as soon as it makes it back to their warehouse!
Instead I charged back my credit card. I’ll never make a big ticket purchase on Amazon ever again.
Yeah, my order was like 30 dollars not almost a grand.
They would give u the refund tho.
Yeah but I did get the food.
I applaud your morality, but have you considered “fuck Amazon”?
I get it, but one also has to preserve their own character so to avoid becoming what we detest in others. For me, telling the lie would not be compatible with who I wish to be.
I did, but I accidentally typed fucked amazonian woman so now I’m distracted…
instructions unclear.
penis is now lodged in the charging port of a rivian delivery van. send reinforcements
The spirit is willing, but the flesh is spongy and
weakbruised.I never thought I’d die this way… but I’d always really hoped!
I’ll accept death by snoo-snoo
*spongy and bruised
Is it amazon getting fucked over or the seller 🤔
I had this exact delivery tracking weirdness on amazon and the seller was another big company… got a refund and have zero regrets.
I worry about that hitting the small sellers on there sometimes, like I ordered something through Amazon recently that very clearly came from a 3rd party small business and it’s a quality product. It got mixed up when I returned something else, and they were like “just keep the refund for both” :/ but I’m worried the 3rd party won’t get paid for it now
It’s probably the biggest dog food brand in the us
In your case then yeah get that refund lol!
It’s just a scrappy bookstore startup bro, they have to use bots because they can’t hire customer service reps fast enough, they need every dollar they have to get past their angel funding phase, they only sell the highest quality items at low prices… Why are you laughing? This is a serious issue! They hired someone to engineer a button to order Tide. This is the future, THE FUTURE! WON’T SOMEBODY PLEASE THINK OF THE FUTURE?!
I think Jeff Bozo will be OK, lol
But how will he afford his fifth mega yacht?
But they’d still give you the refund bro
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.
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.
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.
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??
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.
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.
*Gives A.I. agent access to credit card*
I need a tungsten cube
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!”
What about when you purchase an item and then 24 hours later, you get an email to purchase the item you’ve already purchased.
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.
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.
I don’t see this in my case. All the emails that I get show the actual product.
I’ve started getting these. Its a little odd. The latest one I received told me it shipped “2 camera and 1 kitchen item”. The camera items were a baby monitor and a mount for the baby camera and the kitchen item were coffee filters. So I guess it’s accurate but kind of a useless description.
I recently ordered a wall adapter and the associated cable.
Amazon emailed me to confirm my order of two wireless items.
Yeah, I’ve made a rule that just marks them as read and archives the. right away, no point seeing them at all when they’re so useless.
Same, I’m not sure who thought this was actually going to be helpful. Instead it just means I need to figure out exactly which item it’s talking about in the email
Maybe it was a privacy thing? Like they don’t want to put “we shipped your ENORMOUS DILDO” in the subject and body of the email.
Or for a more reasonable example, stuff like contraceptives to people in places with repressive governments like Kansas.
They don’t want Google having access to all of the juicy customer behavior/interests and product pricing information. Any privacy benefit for end users is purely coincidental, but very welcome. Though, I’d hope anyone that cares about privacy even a little bit is staying far away Gmail and others like it.
emails
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