I know I’ll be told I need to be super secretive when ordering gifts online, and I’m upset a bit because it’s happened twice in different ways, but I think it’s a poor business practice.
We have one Amazon account and it’s linked to the main “family” email address that we can all access. We don’t generally open each others’ emails and if, at gift giving time, if I were to see a “Thank You For Your Order” and I hadn’t ordered anything, I’d leave it for my wife to open.
However, Last week I ordered something through Amazon for our daughter’s birthday. I was surprised and a little upset that the name of the item ordered appeared in the subject line of the order confirmation. Something along the lines of “Your [Gift Name] Order.” and “[Gift Name] Order Processing.” I snagged those before my daughter might happen across them, but today–still two weeks before my daughter’s birthday-- I find what’s basically an ad for similar products and again the subject line includes the name of the gift I bought.
Now, before you lecture me that I should use a private email address, I’ll tell you about another gift “leak” at Christmas. That was from a company I had never ordered from and there was no established account, so I used my own private email address when buying a piece of jewelry for my wife. In this case, a few days later I found in our snail mail box a postcard thanking me for my order and advertising other goods. (Our credit card billing address is our home mailing address.) First, I had not even received the actual purchase yet and already I’m getting junk mail. And second, how about putting it in an envelope with my name on it instead of on a card that anybody taking in the mail can see?
Really makes me want to shop anonymously with cash in brick and mortar stores. . .
Same reason we share a mailing address and a home.
Did you miss part two where I ordered from my private email and got printed paper mail sent to the house that would have tipped the gift if I had not gone to the mailbox before my wife did?
I’m guessing this was from one of Amazon’s “marketplace” sellers, rather than from Amazon themselves? All the e-mails I get from Amazon just have subject lines like “Your Amazon.com Order (###########)”
Mr. Athena and I don’t share an email account, but we do share an Amazon account, because we both have Kindles, and if you want stuff you buy for Kindle to be available to both our Kindles, you have to share an account.
It does get tricky when we want to buy each other gifts from Amazon. He either has to do it through his own personal account, or I have to tell him to not look at Amazon’s emails.
It also sometimes comes up because we only have one iPad, and it’s synced to my email. Mr. Athena uses the iPad and sometimes wants to send himself a link, which involves him seeing my emails. Most of the time I have no problems with that, but around Christmas/Birthday he’s told to keep his eyes closed when my email account comes up!
Our system is generally like Athena’s as far as avoiding emails about order confirmations, etc., near holiday and birthday times. My complaint is really about why they need to name the purchased item in the subject line. That gives it away even if the email is not opened.
And yes, Thudlow, this order was from a marketplace vendor, not actually from Amazon directly.