// THE VERGE — CYBERSECURITY
Why your Amazon order confirmation emails have become so unhelpful
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Good news! Your Beauty and Electronics items are arriving tomorrow!
Good news! Your Beauty and Electronics items are arriving tomorrow!
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Earlier this summer, Amazon customers began noticing that emails related to their online orders looked sparse: Order confirmation emails didn’t name specific items anymore, and instead listed only item categories.
“Your Beauty item is confirmed!” an email about my retainer cleaning tablets read. Shoppers have posted other iterations of the redacted emails as well: “Ordered: 1 Hardware item,” “Your Drugstore, Shoes, and other items are here!” and “1 Nutrition & Wellness, 1 Wireless Accessories,” for example. The emails have clip art-style illustrations of general product categories, and a shopper has to exit their email and go to Amazon to see what item it’s actually referring to.
Complaints about the vague emails appear to have started in July; orders placed as recently as June contain thumbnails and names of the exact item purchased. Some shoppers are complaining to Amazon about the new system, saying the emails with no details make it harder to keep track of purchases (and kind of look like spam or a phishing attempt). Amazon has a long history of tweaking how order emails look — there are complaints going back years about what’s included and what isn’t — but in the last month and a half, more and more shoppers are noticing the vague order update notifications.