Amazon kills Order History Reports

[swimtome]

Summary

Amazon has an option to download all your order history to a convenient spreadsheet. (Riley sub-voice - to let you quickly see how much money you've given the Rocket man).  In yet another reminder that your data isn't yours Amazon is killing this feature in a week.

 

Quotes

Quote

For those of you who keep track of what you order, Amazon will be removing the Order History Reports in March 20, 2023.

This report allows you to download a csv file with all of your order history information and is useful for things such as insurance purposes. The furthest back you can go for data was January 1st, 2006.

 

My thoughts

 In a recent WAN Show Linus was saying how companies should be forced to provide 'call me back' if the queue is longer then a bit.  

 

 I strongly feel that it should be a similar requirement for companies to provide a way for you to download all your transactions from them AND that emails should be required to neatly show a freaking normal receipt.   Have you seen what a receipt from Amazon looks like lately?  It basically shows order total and ETA.  No item information.

 

 Will I'm sure this more 'want to clear legacy system' then 'were trying to hide how much you really spend' - it just really reeks of corporate FU.

 

 

Sources

https://www.amazon.com/b2b/reports

https://www.doctorofcredit.com/amazon-to-sunset-order-history-reports-after-march-20th/

 

[PDifolco]

Interestingly this feature doesn't seem to exist on Amazon.fr except for Business accounts... Would be real useful  

[swimtome]

1 minute ago, PDifolco said:

Interestingly this feature doesn't seem to exist on Amazon.fr except for Business accounts... Would be real useful  

You can checkout this, https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/amazon-order-history-repo/mgkilgclilajckgnedgjgnfdokkgnibi

 

In my experience you need to clear the cache between runs but overall its alot better then nothing.

[P e r s e p h o n e]

Oh thank god! I can finally hide all my freaky orders..... /s

 

I suppose some of this makes sense from a pure cost perspective. At least from the view of Amazon. Though I doubt they'd toss the data. Which means they're only saving on the costs from serving to the customers. Which means they're still free to analyze it as they wish.... UGHHHH BIG TECH!

[PDifolco]

10 minutes ago, swimtome said:

You can checkout this, https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/amazon-order-history-repo/mgkilgclilajckgnedgjgnfdokkgnibi

 

In my experience you need to clear the cache between runs but overall its alot better then nothing.

Mmm installed it but how does this work ?

[swimtome]

1 minute ago, PDifolco said:

Mmm installed it but how does this work ?

Just go to your order history page, click the extension, and pick the year.  In theory.

https://github.com/philipmulcahy/azad for more info

 

 

[P e r s e p h o n e]

@swimtomeI'm curious. Do you use it? If so why?

[swimtome]

Just now, P e r s e p h o n e said:

@swimtomeI'm curious. Do you use it? If so why?

There's the general /r/datahoarder vibe - but for me specifically I still balance my books myself.  This makes it very easy to match up Amazon orders to credit card transactions (and also to bill people who I let use my Amazon account).

[P e r s e p h o n e]

43 minutes ago, swimtome said:

There's the general /r/datahoarder vibe - but for me specifically I still balance my books myself.  This makes it very easy to match up Amazon orders to credit card transactions (and also to bill people who I let use my Amazon account).

LOL you remind me of my mom. She does the same thing, and she's also the token Amazon account person between friends and family. Also yeah I get the data hoarding thing. I'm at 48TB of usable storage myself LOL 

[Kisai]

2 hours ago, swimtome said:

Summary

Amazon has an option to download all your order history to a convenient spreadsheet. (Riley sub-voice - to let you quickly see how much money you've given the Rocket man).  In yet another reminder that your data isn't yours Amazon is killing this feature in a week.

 

 

 

They're probably getting probed by the governments for high grocery prices and want to hide the evidence that they charge different customers, different prices.

 

Amazon, any any other retailer, bank, credit card, paypal, etc company should be required to show you an order history for as long as you can be audited by the taxman, and if they're not going to keep it that long they should be required to ship you a hard copy of your choice (paper or usb stick.) So 3-4 years for Canada and the US.

 

[soldier_ph]

I mean as long as they keep the Order History page on the account. Otherwise it would be a real bad time for everyone. I don't order much from Amazon but am definitely upset about this Story.

[LAwLz]

I don't really get why some people are so upset about this. I didn't even know this was a thing, and I kind of doubt a lot of people did. 

 

I am also not aware of any other store that offers this feature. 

 

 

Just so that people don't misunderstand what this is about, they are not removing your order history page.

They are not hiding any data from you either, so I am not sure where the conspiracy theories are coming from. 

What they are doing is removing the feature to download an Excel file that contains your orders. 

I don't really get what the fuss is all about. It seems like a very niche feature.

[Jordan-AffixAPI]

On 3/13/2023 at 11:35 PM, LAwLz said:

I don't really get why some people are so upset about this. I didn't even know this was a thing, and I kind of doubt a lot of people did. 

 

I am also not aware of any other store that offers this feature. 

 

 

Just so that people don't misunderstand what this is about, they are not removing your order history page.

They are not hiding any data from you either, so I am not sure where the conspiracy theories are coming from. 

What they are doing is removing the feature to download an Excel file that contains your orders. 

I don't really get what the fuss is all about. It seems like a very niche feature.

The big issue is not being able to uniformly access your own data. A lot of people use these reports to organize their budget or for 1099 / tax stuff. Some people do it themselves, but others need this file to give to their tax person or accountant. Because global spending on Amazon is about 30-40%~, this is a huge portion of consumer and small business spend. 

 

We used to use these reports to allow users to pass their data to their platform of choice but now we just connect to the raw data; unfortunately we don't have a B2C product but we can still get your data to your platform if they don't already use AffixAPI. 

 

@" I am also not aware of any other store that offers this feature. " - yeah, that's unfortunately true. That's the problem, you should be able to access your purchase history in a report! I guess its kind of an expectation that someone as large as Amazon would have this and not take it away from their customers if they've already built out the function.

[Erioch]

On 3/14/2023 at 12:35 AM, LAwLz said:

What they are doing is removing the feature to download an Excel file that contains your orders. 

I remember messing with this one day several years ago and then promptly forgot about it.

[StDragon]

On 3/13/2023 at 6:57 PM, Kisai said:

Amazon, any any other retailer, bank, credit card, paypal, etc company should be required to show you an order history for as long as you can be audited by the taxman, and if they're not going to keep it that long they should be required to ship you a hard copy of your choice (paper or usb stick.) So 3-4 years for Canada and the US.

 

Should? Should?! Why must I front the cost as a consumer to pay for all that extra compute, storage, and administrative costs to retain and facilitate that info? The onus should be on the lazy bums to keep track of their e-receipts that decide to itemize their deduction.

[Kisai]

10 minutes ago, StDragon said:

Should? Should?! Why must I front the cost as a consumer to pay for all that extra compute, storage, and administrative costs to retain and facilitate that info? The onus should be on the lazy bums to keep track of their e-receipts that decide to itemize their deduction.

It costs Amazon nothing to store 10KB of data.

[swimtome]

1 hour ago, StDragon said:

Should? Should?! Why must I front the cost as a consumer to pay for all that extra compute, storage, and administrative costs to retain and facilitate that info? The onus should be on the lazy bums to keep track of their e-receipts that decide to itemize their deduction.

Cause its better for the consumer? Why would any store make user-friendly features?  It’s a freaking select statement calm down. 
 

And as mentioned above, Amazons e-receipts are terrible. 

[Avocado Diaboli]

4 hours ago, StDragon said:

Should? Should?! Why must I front the cost as a consumer to pay for all that extra compute, storage, and administrative costs to retain and facilitate that info? The onus should be on the lazy bums to keep track of their e-receipts that decide to itemize their deduction.

Amazon are already a data kraken, they're gonna collect every piece they legally can. Never mind that they're legally required to keep records anyway. You're not seriously under the impression that they're just storing that stuff just to make it convenient for customers or that you as one of their customers are footing that much of the overhead bill, right? A few years ago, I might have concluded that this ultracapitalist knee jerk reaction was pure satire, but at this point I'm incapable of telling whether you're actually serious or not.

[StDragon]

15 hours ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

A few years ago, I might have concluded that this ultracapitalist knee jerk reaction was pure satire, but at this point I'm incapable of telling whether you're actually serious or not.

Focus on the cause, not the symptom. The issue at hand in my commentary is that the US tax code is over 6,800 pages long (75k if you include official explanatory documentation).

 

And you're wanting to pile more onto that dumpster fire.

[Avocado Diaboli]

7 hours ago, StDragon said:

Focus on the cause, not the symptom. The issue at hand in my commentary is that the US tax code is over 6,800 pages long (75k if you include official explanatory documentation).

 

And you're wanting to pile more onto that dumpster fire.

But that's not what you said. That's not what the comment you responded to was about. Taxes have been brought up because the amount of time transaction data legally needs to be kept by corporations in case of audits is also a sensible time frame for it to be made available to customers, since, you know, they have to keep it on hand regardless. Either that, or the warranty period, whichever is longer. This has nothing to do with taxes or adding to existing tax law. I suggest you take your own advice and focus more, because it seems like you saw the word "taxes" and immediately threw a belt.