Unhelpful Amazon Order Confirmation E-mails

I also don't like not seeing the items in my confirmation mail, but I routinely print the invoice pages from everything I order. I do it in order to have a paper receipt that I can later compare to my credit card statements, in order to ensure that every charge is legitimate. As a bonus side-effect, it also means I have a piece of paper with every order number, in order to match up those e-mails with the orders.

Oh I thought I was the only one that was driving crazy by this!!

Its entirely annoying and I hate it.

I noticed the same, and have seen the same explanation.

It helps that searching my past orders on Amazon.com works pretty well, though it can still be annoying when I'm not sure it was Amazon I ordered from in the first place. It used to bother me that I don't receive a proper receipt, but now I don't mind so much; I do get a paper receipt along with delivery, and I usually just throw it away anyway.

Related:

- https://twitter.com/ambimorph/status/1080215510967414784
- https://twitter.com/avidrissman/status/1080126259265523719

[…] (Michael Tsai) Unhelpful Amazon Order Confirmation E-mails […]

Is it possible they're only doing this for gmail accounts? I have a non-gmail account and I still get full order info in my order and shipping confirmation e-mails. Odd.

UPDATE: I also order through a Business Prime account, however. Perhaps that's the distinction - they're no longer including the info for personal accounts but they still do for Business?

[…] Amazon Order Emails No Longer Include Item Details […]

"Is it possible they're only doing this for gmail accounts?"

Negative. I no longer see them either, and I do not have anything Google in my life.

Anyone notice they still mention what you bought at the bottom in the “Recommended for you based on X that you bought”?

[…] Michael Tsai – Blog – Unhelpful Amazon Order Confirmation E-mails […]

Yes, I noticed this too and find it inconvenient. I'll receive an email saying my order is shipped but I have no idea what it is. If they send the order details as an image (instead of text) in the email then it will be much harder for Gmail to scrape and understand the image contents.

In case anybody is keeping score, I endorse the complaints above, and I note this was done without warning or explanation. Thanks to Michael for surfacing this. Amazon's mysterious and capricious behavior reinforces the idea that I want a copy of my own data. I download my order history annually, but it's not the same.

I've noticed this as well. But each order e-mail I get does have a link to the order on Amazon, so the order info is just one click away. Still not as convenient as it used to be, but not completely inaccessible either.

@A. Hajra: Not inaccessible, but it is *unsearchable* in your Mail client.

How about a boycott until they make it convenient again to shop on Amazon!? This is a global issue, I'm from France.

I just talked to a CSR and she confirmed that this is 100% intentional and there was no department she could tranfer me to that would help me. Probably the only e-commerce site that does not tell you what you ordered, what's been shipped, or what's been delivered, via email.

Ditto all of the comments above. What’s particularly irritating is that they didn’t even have the courtesy to tell their hundreds of millions of customers about the change in advance and give a justification for doing it. It wastes everybody’s time in investigating the problem to see if it’s just them it’s affecting only to discover it’s due to a global change, impacting all customers.

Thank god y found this thread, this problem was driving me nuts. For me that almost exclusively use a cell phone (iPhone) in conjunction with Amazon shopping app the problem is compounded.

You see, there is a (convoluted) way to print an invoice for the products bought in Amazon.com’ s website, AND In the shopping app this option is disabled, so the only way to do this, is to print the invoice is from a computer.

Also did I mentioned that if you want to save the printout of your invoice on a folder somewhere, then your computer system better have an option to “print to pdf” otherwise you will be saving an illegible copy of the raw printer output.

Later on I learned how to print to pdf the invoice and email it from the iPhone when needed for warranty or protection plans purposes.

Hope this helps

I boycott amazon for a week now and will continue my boycott, until they give me the really necessary information about my orders back by email

This is so frustrating. When I buy something online I keep the acknowledgement email in a pending folder until the item arrives, so it is easy to see what items I am waiting for. But with Amazon it is now too time-consuming checking what the order is for. When an item arrives, I now have to search through several pending orders to see which one it is, instead of just looking through the emails. Not customer friendly at all.

I've had this change to my account for the past two years, it still annoys me.

Same here, so annoying. Trailing back through the emails for orders, now i dont know what orders i'm looking at.

You can see the details of your order by clicking on the 'Order Details' link in the email. But this is a new security risk as it encourages customers to click on links in emails, one of the major ways of initiating a phishing or malware attack. By doing this, Amazon is setting its customers up as a target for malware attacks.

This has been annoying me for a while. However, strangely my wife has a Gmail account and her emails include the item names, while my Yahoo account does not. Our accounts are linked though Amazon family, but mine is the one linked to our Amazon echo devices. I wonder if that has something to do with it... I know that over Christmas our shipping notifications on the echo devices wouldn't include item details as "it is during a holiday period" and I assumed it was related to that with some account setting. Digging though the account, order and notification settings on the website I couldn't find anything however.

Ah, I'm glad i found this thread too.

I didn't know it was due to scraping.

I actually thought it was a marketing ploy to get you back to their website to buy more stuff. Just as someone would want you to visit their store again, Amazon has found the perfect way to make you come back

Hi all, The lack of any description of the good purchased is a real pain when I may have six or more orders in progress. I have registered my complaint with Amazon Customer Service which took ages and four different personnel. I also track purchases against credit card and accounts package and this lack of information slows the whole process down.
I was wondering if we could all lobby the third party suppliers but Amazon seems immune to any kind of criticism.

Nice to know that I'm not the only person annoyed by these emails. Why for pete's sake do these emails not include details of my order?
#1 Email "Your order is on it's way!" NOT include exactly WHAT item I ordered.
#2 Email, Even more aggravating, "Your Item has been delivered". AGAIN, only a picture of my package (NOT helpful) and the Order Number (again NOT helpful).
After clicking a few links, I get the item description and a picture.
WHY THE HELL CAN'T THEY INCLUDE THAT INFORMATION IN THE ORIGINAL EMAIL???
There has to be a reason.

I get so annoyed every time I open an Amazon email and it doesn't provide the item information I need. I think they did this because they don't want people to keep track of their purchases so easily. Amazon wants customers to buy it and then forget it. They also want to prevent third party apps to track price drops and alert the customers of the price change.

So glad I found this thread - thought I had done something to my settings! So annoying. I used to find it really helpful.

[…] it could be an effort to prevent services such as Edison Mail and Cleanfox from “scraping” user inboxes and gleaning key insights from […]

[…]  Amazon stopped including item details in order confirmation and shipping notification emails a few months ago. They just show the price and order date now. For all its faults, Amazon has pretty good customer service, which makes this user-hostile change baffling to understand. Sure, you can still see your orders on Amazon’s website and download a CSV, but it’s far more cumbersome than searching your email; … […]

This change to the emails has made me very frustrated, because I use those to track what I received and what I didn't. It's pain to login to my Amazon account and look through my orders. I just got off a customer support chat with Amazon and he changed my preference to include item details. He said this setting is not available for me to change. I placed another order to see what the email looks like, and the only change is it's in HTML format instead of text format. Still no item details. I'm angry.

So frustrating - how to alert them to this irritation? For months my gmail sends a shipping confirmation email but doesn’t mention what it’s shipping. Only “if you bought this you’ll like this algorithm”. So I need to log in to see what is shipping. Why ? Must surely be a mistake. V annoying.

This is total BS. I'm guessing they have what they consider a good reason...because WTF - most sites do this from the moment they go live. Give me the freakin name of what I ordered in my email!!!

I had several Amazon support chats to try and resolve this, and the last one promised it would be forwarded to the 'special department' and resolved within 3-5 days...now 11 days an counting.

I think if many people do the same, it could help get this functionality back. There ought to be legislation to make it mandatory to receive an itemized invoice from any company if requested (Amazon, bank statements, etc.). It is inexcusable in this era to not have control of our own records and not rely on the company you are doing business with to still be around years from now if you want to search for a previous transaction.

Just my 2 cents.

To build on the September 3rd comment, it may also have something to do with Shopify's Shop app, which reads your emails and organizes all of your tracking info from just about any website, and which many have said is trying to be an Amazon competitor.

I can't believe this is intentional! (Actually I do believe it, really I am just indignant about it.)

It feels like the 1990s when e-commerce just came about and companies did not know what (or how, even) to send their customer emails about their orders.

Amazon's new policy means their emails are pretty much useless. And because their CS makes it impossible to talk with someone of any power or authority, it probably won't change. :-(

I think it is pretty obvious why Amazon had done this: they try to make you spend more money in their store.

You don't get the information you are looking for in the e-mails, so you have to visit their website. Once you are there, they can show you ads, sponsored products, and there is a great chance you will be pulled into buying something.

One could even consider this shameful tactic as a dark pattern: https://darkpatterns.org

Shame on you Amazon.

So now Google assistant can’t show you details of upcoming Amazon orders. The emails are useless now.

Agreed. So annoyed with Amazon about this. Secondly, who HATES the complex emails and credit card charges that are from an order broken into more than one shipment?? I spend hours trying to figure out WHICH items are being charged for. I know the "Printable Invoice" has this info at the bottom, but it still does not tell you which items are included in the credit card charge. OMG, the multi-billion dollar company cannot figure out simple ergonomics and customer politeness.

Another thought...

Perhaps I'm too cynical, but if the only place you can check up on your orders is on the Amazon website, you're spending more time on their site and seeing adverts, etc., which they can charge for...

Worse though, if they cancel an order that you've already paid for, it disappears from your order history! How do we know if they returned all of the charges they took from your credit card, for x y and z 3 months ago?!?

Not impressed by this move - it's one of those idiotic autocratic decisions taken somewhere at a high level, probably with some underhanded, profit driven motivations...

Annoys me too.

Apparently it’s to stop the details being scraped.

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/amazon-order-email-confirmation-shipping-details-a9543966.html

Still annoying as 🤬

I am yet another annoyed customer having this issue. I've contacted CS twice now and both times have been told it'll be elevated to the appropriate dept and they'll be in touch. Nothing further the first time and I'm not holding my breath this time either.
I use my e-mails as a way to track what I'm waiting for and what I've received, I keep all my purchase e-mails and they go in a pending folder until I have the items. It's so time consuming to have to click on track order every time to find out what it actually is.
I figured a quick Google may enlighten me and it really has. This is a ridiculous practice and to have no reasoning behind it is just making it worse.

I've spent a frustrating half hour on the CS chat trying to explain why this is frustrating (yes I know I can view my orders from the app or website, but I use my emails as my system to manage any online orders). No other retailer that I know of doesn't include the item name in the order confirmation email.

I am just hoping that the more of us who complain the more likely there will be an option to have the emails include the item description.

There is a link in the email that will take you straight to the invoice of the order.

At the very bottom of the email, in the fine grey text says "Your invoice can be accessed here", click on the word "here". It should pull up the invoice which has the items listed in text only. No pictures.

I've complained about this before:

https://twitter.com/dhimmel/status/1018948319119400961
https://twitter.com/dhimmel/status/1075843805583163394

I expect to be able to search my email to retrieve receipts from old purchases. Due to this issue, I now shop at alternative retailers like REI that respect the customer and send useful emails.

Is anyone else as outraged as I am at being used as pawns in a modern feudal corporate warfare?

Amazon claims to be #1 in customer satisfaction but this is purely a claim of ownership on our spending habits to which we all probably blindly signed off to when we clicked on Accept on the legal mumbojumbo decades ago.

This is not a customer friendly move on their part. The customers are being priced and hoarded like cattle.

It's not our fault that the Internet and Email were never designed for secure commerce in the first place.

Why should we be the ones to suffer because of their greed?

I know this is probably an unpopular opinion, but you can stop buying things from Amazon? I stopped something like 12 years ago (I had a bad customer experience, so I decided that they didn't want me as their customer), so it is possible...

Although Amazon's shipping is the key to their success, their regard for customer feedback seems terrible.

The lack of any meaningful description or listing of what has been ordered makes their "confirmation" emails utterly useless.

I find this to be a middle finger given to their customers.

Just had an idea. How many people on here have an Amazon Echo or dot?

What is the point of an email telling me that one of the 3 items on my order has been shipped without telling me what that item is? Amazon - Make this an option PLEASE!!!!!

I spoke with an Amazon agent today via the online chat. They said,

"We receive inquiry on this issue frequently from our valuable customers.
Nothing to worry, our team is working on this to reinstate that option.
It will be adopted and will be available back to a sooner date as possible
We do value your feedback and will fix it as soon as possible."

And "Our team has not yet updated a time frame about it yet.
However, I do expect that it will be reinstated within a 1-2 weeks maximum"

Surely just give every customer the option - keep off by default but those ok with scraping can reinstate. It’s all about enabling security but keeping choice nowadays, we are grown ups.

I've been frustrated by this for too long now and have been periodically reporting my frustration to Amazon Support. IT IS NOT GOOD. Order receipts should contain our order contents. !!!!!

This is so awful. I order some items for my freelance business use, and I used to just be able to move those Amazon receipts immediately into a folder that I can use for tracking business expenses and tax purposes. No--I don't want another, separate business account--I don't do THAT much business. But now it's impossible to keep track of anything in a simple way.

I might just move to their competitors just to get a decent receipt history. This makes me sick. So tired of being treated as a pawn.

Amazon wants you to visit the site. When you get an order confirmation e-mail and you get suckered into clicking it, that's another opportunity for them to sell you something. You might just look at your order details and leave. Or you might scroll down and see other items for sale. And that leads to another sale. The alternative is to include the details you need in the e-mail. That doesn't lead to another potential sale so why include the information you need?

Upvote

+1 for a frustrated Amazon customer.

with multiple purchases on the go it is so much more difficult to track overcharges, refunds and non-deliveries.

They can say all they want that this is about email scraping, but we all know it's not. As a few have said already, this is to get you back in the app or website. They're publicly using the email scraping as a scapegoat. This is the same reason that some online stores use a tracking frontend on their website instead of just forwarding you to FedEx or UPS.

+1
I've been annoyed about this for months, but my order a couple of days ago infuriated me. I'd ordered 5 items at the same time, to be delivered on the same day. They were split across 4 deliveries; 2 items via Amazon delivery; 1 by normal Royal Mail, 2 by Royal Mail 24hr. The Amazon courier left the first 2 at my door in the morning (love you, Mr Amazon Courier!); and the other 3 were delivered in 2 packages to the development mail room (not in my building). My normal mail gets delivered to my building's mail room.

Of course, it's no big deal for me to check different delivery places within the development, but I had no idea what had been delivered or to which location, from my emails. Please, Amazon, include the package contents in emails!

I've found a small solution to enable searching email history for items bought, which will include Amazon items bought. It's a bit clunky. When I receive order confirmation I identify what the item is, by unfortunately going into Amazon order. I then forward the order confirmation to myself and include the item description. So in the future I can use the item description in an email search.

I do something similar to Janet. When I've ordered something and the email has arrived, I edit it (Outlook lets you do that) and paste the pic and details from the website order view in at the top. Then you can see at a glance what's in that order, even if it gets split into several orders on the same email.

Clunky, yes. Irritating, yes. But at least it works.

This is really annoying and just looks unprofessional. I bet they'll make a privacy type argument about this, or just keep quiet about it. If that's the road they choose to take, Amazon should give us an option to opt-in to have order emails actually include the order.

This is a great example of a company taking away convenience for their benefit/manipulation of our clicks and information. It seems to happen so often in the online world. I consider this a warning from Amazon in a way, and it is really going to bias me against purchases from them.

Very annoying...I an reconciling and doing accounting for my small business. Previously I could just forward my Amazon email to my accounting application and it automatically parses and organizes. Now I need to go to each order...print as pdf and manually upload. This annoyance is enough for me to shop around for Target/Walmart....

I'm pretty convinced this is to prompt you to visit Amazon and then...spend more money!

and they still include the price and pics of other items? what's the point of removing it is beyond me. super annoying!

To add insult to injury: The item is (somtimes) right there in the e-mail. Check the recommendations

"Customers who bought ... also bought"

I needed to commiserate, and this thread helped! hah

Amazon only had good customer service because they wanted to get big - now they are big, they no longer care.

The last comment "now they are big, they no longer care" is spot on. I, like everyone have become annoyed at Amazon removing the order details from confirmation emails. Each item should be a thumbnail, single line description, price, quantity, line total, then a block total paid by whatever means.

Some of these companies are useless (eg eBay, Paypal, etc) in presenting professional neat docs needed for business purposes. They use massive amounts of white space, large logos, etc, and when you print it out the lot could be using 6 pages instead of just one page. All due to useless programmers who don't have to have docs for tax purposes!

I am currently having a long drawn out online chat with a useless operative who is really annoying me. My solution is to give really bad ratings to anything and everything I buy from Amazon until they rescind this appalling practice.

This is driving me nuts too!

Hopefully Amazon ecommerce
Execs will come across this thread. I found this in my confusion and annoyance in my order of 23 items from multiple vendors only telling me an estimated time of shipment with a URL. Ridiculous.

THIS THREAD!! OMG! Sooo frustrating!

I used those old emails that contained the item details to keep track of everything, now the emails are useless! I also used the emails to help me categorize what downloaded from amazon into quicken. Now I'm forced to used their order history webpage.

Get this! Today I go to my order history page to figure out what downloaded into quicken. Now the damn price of the order isn't displayed on the order history page!, now I have to click another link (click details or invoice) to see the order costs!

this just keep getting worse!

Somewhere, there is a unassuming web designer who made these changes, he/she has no clue how they've angered so many!

Who the hell at Amazon approved this?? you know there has to be a whole design review and approval process before these changes are made public. how do we contact these people? such a huge peeve of mine...

Amazon did this because there were companies you could sign up for that would scan your emails for receipts, then it would find lower prices as Automatically email Amazon for a lower price. Amazon changed their price match policy and emails because of practices like that. Not even sure those companies are around anymore. But if you don’t list the product via email then they can’t scan for better prices. Paribus was one I used until Amazon changed the emails and it became ineffective.

I was really annoyed when Amazon began this practice and I'm still annoyed, several years later. Since the pandemic started, I began ordering more things from Amazon and I, too, keep a "waiting" folder in my email to see what items I've received and which are still pending. It is such a pain to have to go through the folder and check each email to see which Amazon item the email pertains to, see if I've received it and then put in in the proper file. The only way I've found to make it SLIGHTLY easier is to enter the Amazon transaction number in the search function of my mail so that all of the emails pertaining to the item come up together - that is, unless I've ordered a number of different items that were then shipped separately... Gosh darn it!!!!

If you use gmail (or other email system that groups the replies together) one useful trick is to reply to yourself including any additional information, that way you can still find that email with a search.

For instance, you bought some slippers from amazon, just reply to the order confirmation with the word "slippers", then later on you can search your email for "slippers". Or, for instance, reply to your hotel booking confirmation with "sue and gary silver wedding"

This is an Amazon punishment to those who buy too much from them. If you only buy 1 item from time to time then you don't have issue knowing what is being shipped when the email is sent to you. The email could have been useful for items that I'm awaiting shipment. In a way the email is doing its job in driving its customers crazy. You know what it is called? It's the power of big tech, they can do what they want.

For me, I search my email archive to find something I bought at some point, say because I want it again. I can't possibly remember if I bought it on Amazon or ebay or whatever, but searching for the item solves that. Until Amazon pulled this.
Yet another reason not to buy from amazon, added to the 'are you sure for the nth time you don't not not want prime?'

While it doesn't address the lack of searchable orders/items in my email, the "Amazon Order History Reporter" Chrome extension does at least let me quickly see my order info:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/amazon-order-history-repo/mgkilgclilajckgnedgjgnfdokkgnibi

I just sent this to jeff@amazon.com. Maybe if more people write to his email address, he and the executive complaints team will actually take this seriously.

---

Could you please restore the list of items to order confirmations? Not having these anymore prevents me from easily:

- checking whether I have received all the items in the order
- forwarding on information to others about what has been ordered or is expected
- having my own record of my purchases

These were all things I could do in less than a second on my mobile phone before and now take many clicks and waiting.

Literally every other retailer I use includes an itemized receipt in emails. That Amazon has removed this seems anti-customer. It's been more than a year since the list of items was removed and I have not gotten used to it—it just gets more infuriating every time.

Pursuing this through support channels has been fruitless. This is the first time I have written to you in more than 19 years as an Amazon customer. I just can't deal with this anymore.

Michael Hoffman

I posted a comment earlier in Feb 21 and following on from Michael Hoffman's post I decided to also send an email to jeff@amazon.com:

Dear Sir

I have been a regular customer of Amazon and over the years have watched the company grow from when it first started, when I used to order many technical books from you.

I am getting increasingly frustrated and have contacted customer support about this but nothing has been done nor have I had the courtesy of a reply.

When I order items from any professional supplier (apart from Amazon) I get an order confirmation listing each item with a thumbnail with an individual and line price, line by line. Nice and compact and containing all information for accounts - all on 1 A4 page and not 3 or 4 pages (which wastes paper and destroys the environment.) This list is then used and each item is ticked off when the goods arrive.

When the supplier sends out items (in full of part shipment) they list each item in the package, again with a thumbnail, with an individual and line price, line by line.

You have stopped doing this and so I now do not know what has actually been ordered, what is being delivered, are they the large items I need to be in to receive or are they the small items which can be left in the storage/letter box.

I am sorry to say that your system has become very non-professional and is now really difficult to use. It has been like this for over a year and I cannot continue to use it unless I cannot find the items elsewhere.

I have never written to you directly before and I am upset that I have been forced to do so, when you should have the foresight to recognise your ordering and shipping notifications have deteriorated.

You have a professional team of programmers - can they please study other suppliers, such as Farnells, CPC, RS Components, etc, etc, who all behave in a very professional manner and provide all of the information in a neat and orderly business-like fashion.

Yours faithfully

I noticed this some time ago and really irritated me. Amazon has now joined my shit list along with Google and Facebook.

The best workaround is to export and download your Amazon order history so when I search my Mac for an item name it will pop up and I have a permanent record to which I can refer.

This has frustrated me for ages! Amazon told me they did this deliberately, but it's so unhelpful.

However they've just (today) emailed me an order confirmation - for a bottle of gin - that lists the item. Any chance they've had a change of mind? I fear the delivery notification will still not tell me what's inside.

The reason they do this is because it forces you to go to their site to check the order list, which creates an opportunity for further purchase as now you are on an ecommerce platform exposed to all its messaging and prompts, etc. If you just had the information you wanted there would be no reason to wal into the store, where there is a non-zero chanelce that you will soend money you otherwise never would have. I guarantee this change was calculated orecisely for this effect, and has paid off well on their end, now that everyone is hooked on their service as a primary means for shopping.

It seems that the change is now being reverted to include full product descriptions (at least in the UK). Maybe thanks to all the above contributors, and others, who complained about the simplified version?

In the US I've still only gotten order number and total in my emails the last few times, including today.

Little late to the party on this, and it looks like Bea already had the same idea I did.

If my order ships in parts, by not having the items listed in the email, I have to go to their website and see everything else they suggest I buy. Thus I'm more likely to make another purchase. I think our hypothesis is also supported by the fact they do manage to include multiple photos/links of suggested items they think I might like to buy in the email.

Wow, what a thread! We should start a support group, or an angry mob, or both!

This is infuriating for all the reasons listed above. I'll add a few more:

1. Amazon's own Help page indicates that email confirmations list the item name - https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201633550

2. You can't forward order information to anyone else so that they're aware of what was ordered / when it will arrive, since they'd need your login info in order to access it

3. But most of all - salt in the wound, really - because you can't turn these emails off!! So they have made them useless and also impossible to disable. Spitting in my eye, Amazon, IN MY EYE!!

Hopefully they'll reverse this practice in the US as it seems like they might be doing in the UK. I'm also looking into getting a Business account since it seems like the Business accounts may work differently (at least, one commenter above suggested that - it's not like I'd expect Amazon to provide this information, no, of course not, the best way to inform customers of a policy is to make them read about it on a 1.5 yr old blog comment thread...)

Amazon.co.uk user here. After pretty much ignoring all emails coming from Amazon for the last couple of months (due to them being utterly useless), I just went through my emails, only to find that starting with my order on 28 June 2021 they began listing the products bought in the email again. Thanks for the effort everyone!

Update - I switched to a business account (in the US) and bam - product names in the order confirmations! It sounds like Amazon may be revisiting this practice based on the comment above, but in the interim if you're in the US and if switching to a business account is a possibility for you then it does solve the problem.

From a business perspective this is also incredibly frustrating. I work for a company which has a mobile app. If there are any problems with an in-app purchase, we ask the user to send us their email receipt so that we can get the issue sorted for them. But since this change, the Amazon email is now useless because it just shows the customer spent X amount on Amazon, not what they bought or even that it was within our app!

We now have to instruct Amazon customers (and Amazon customers only, putting them at a disadvantage to Apple or Google customers) to go to their Amazon order history and screenshot the order to send to us. Not all of our users have the tech knowledge to do this easily. It's a really frustrating experience for everyone involved.

How do I put an end to these useless emails? There is no unsubscribe option in the email and Amazon.com when I go to customer service and choose manage communications there is no option to stop emails for delivery notification. REALLY ANNOYING. Guess I'll have to create an auto-delete script.

In Germany I had the same issue and I asked them if they could change my account that I can get all the information in the email back and I forgot about it and half a year later suddenly I got all the details back in the email order. So it can happen.

I see there has not been a post for quite awhile.
I am in the US. I still do not get any purchased item information included in my Amazon Order Confirmation emails, only the confirmation number and a price. My most recent receipt was on August 8, 2022.

I just ordered from Amazon France for the first time and I got a fully detailed email.
I missed those so much.
It made me think there might be a setting somewhere to change this.

I was disappointed to find that this isn't a configurable option.

My frustration is matched by my confusion over why they would choose to not make such an option available.

In know this is an old thread, but apparently Amazon does this so that email services (gmail mainly, I'd guess), can't analyze the data about your purchases for their own marketing and research. It'd be a little easier to swallow if they were doing this for the sake of privacy, but my guess is that it's mostly just an attempt to retain their market share.

Has anyone in the US been able recently to get Amazon to reset this for their purchases?

BTW, Walmart.com is doing the same thing.

Hi Tsai, and all the Users,

It is gratifying to see that someone called this out way back in 2020. I am writing as of 10/11/2023, and at least in the US the practice is VERY MUCH ALIVE! The confirmation emails from all these vendors are now a POS! Utterly, useless junk, and I am surprised that millions of more customers don't see this and raise a ruckus, causing these companies to reverse these perverse (there's no other way to describe them) practices.

BUT THERE'S MORE ...

The link to the order is ALSO useless, IF the order has been surreptitiously DELETED or REMOVED from your order history, by Amazon/its systems, UNKNOWN TO YOU!! This is what happened to me, and caused me to discover it today.

I wanted to reorder an item I'd ordered (a voice recorder, whose manual I stupidly lost, and there's now no way to figure out how the damn thing works, because it's totally non-intuitive, and the buttons mean nothing, and it's manual is not available online or on AMazon - how about a revolutionary idea for Amazon - ask all manufacturers to link the product manual on the product page and make it downloadable, and make that a basic requirement for products that need manuals, but that would be asking for too much from these companies, that seem hell bent on becoming more moronic by the second - the explicit aim seems to be to frustrate the hell out of the customer, and make their life difficult so what could take 5 seconds should take minutes or even hours!).

Anyway, back to my story ...

So, I wish to reorder the item. FORTUNATELY, the items page tells me I ordered it on Feb. 25, 2023. BUT I cannot find the order when I click on "order" on the product page, and I cannot find that order when I look through my order history. It is gone!

Fortunately, I do have the shitty order confirmation email from Amazon, and fortunately, it at least has the order numbers. So, get Amazon to call me and talk to one customer service rep, who ALSO CANNOT FIND THE ORDER, and must "escalate" it.
I talk to the second rep, who tells me that the only reason to NOT find an order is if Amazon's system removed it for SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY!!!! GREAT, so Amazon's system can now randomly remove an order from your order history FOR SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY but WITHOUT GIVING YOU THE CUSTOMER ANY NOTIFICATION OF THAT FACT. That's Amazon colluding with the hackers, because it is making sure that you never come to know about the suspicious activity possibly untiil it is way too late, as I as the customer got THE ORDER CONFIRMATION EMAIL, THE ORDER DELIVERY EMAIL AND THE PRODUCTS!!
So, how on earth would I dream that this order was suspicious and moreover had been REMOVED from my order history by Amazon, without notifying me in ANY WAY!

I was just singularly lucky to go on this hunt and discover this, and THAT IS WHY I am sharing it here, so other tortured souls may find an answer just like I did here - paying it forward.

The Customer Service rep told me - "it is the customer's responsibility to check orders, and we remove the order so you can call us to check what is wrong" SAy WHAT?!!! How the hell will I check on a properly delivered and confirmed order, or even DREAM it was suspicious, UNLESS you tell me Amazon?! I mean who trains these reps, and who comes up with logic like this???

So, the moral of the story is: you should potentially download your order history AFTER EVERY NEW ORDER, BECAUSE YOU NEVER KNOW WHEN AMAZOM WILL SURREPTITIOUSLY DELETE ORDERS FROM YOUR HISTORY WITHOUT TELLING YOU! And, you cannot be confident that the order history online is accurate or complete, because who knows what other orders were deleted/removed by them?!

So, add this to your list of things to be careful about. The "confirmation emails" are basically POS's because they do not confirm anything. And, EVEN THE ABILITY TO CLICK ON YOUR ORDER IS INSUFFICIENT, BECAUSE IF THE ORDER IS DELETED/REMOVED AS IT WAS FOR ME, YOU ARE NOT GOING TO FIND IT AND THE LINK WILL ONLY TAKE YOU TO YOUR MAIN ORDER PAGE, LEAVING YOU SCRATCHING YOUR HEAD WONDERING WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED?!! UNLESS .... you know the rest of the story, which you now do!

CAVEAT EMPTOR friends!

Best,
-Vishal

As everyone else, I was annoyed at this practice since it was introduced in 2020. I redirected all Amazon order confirmation and shipping confirmation emails to my Junk folder, because that is what they practically are now, just filling up my email storage quota with absolutely no useful information.

And then, to my shock, I discovered that some ppl (in my household even) still receive full details in their order and shipping confirmation emails: name of the product they ordered, amount they paid, small picture. They have a normal (aka non-business) account.

I can't figure out what triggers them being special.