p.enthalabs

Amazon now hides all customer reviews on products

77 points · 9 visible top comments · 2026-08-27 15:33:17 UTC

news.ycombinator.com · Read Story HN original

Amazon now hides nearly all product reviews . Filtering and ordering are disabled . Only the top 5-10 are shown . To opt out, a 5 day email request is required

Here is an example of the UI for members of the experiment

https://x.com/stillmisanthro1/status/2092441592242028986

Comments

maxbobby · 2026-08-27 15:57:49 UTC
It looks like Amazon is starting to hide some reviews to protect against data scraping bots, and in some cases it is affecting real (non-bot) customers.

Were you signed in when you got the message? All of the sorting / filtering / search options are showing up fine for me (as a signed in user).

_vertigo · 2026-08-27 16:36:06 UTC
When I clicked “see more reviews” while signed out it prompted me to sign in
CamperBob2 · 2026-08-27 16:51:58 UTC
That's been the case for years.
tonymet · 2026-08-27 22:55:13 UTC
I see it while signed in on all devices (web desktop, iOS, iPad web)
Melatonic · 2026-08-27 16:28:50 UTC
I haven't seen this yet. Never used the app - I use the mobile site usually while logged in (but not always). Unfortunately a few features are missing (like being able to see all items for some reason by a specific seller) but otherwise it works well.

Is this you on X or did you link to a random post ?

everdrive · 2026-08-27 16:41:52 UTC
Hard to know how to feel about this. Bots and such have really ruined the value of customer reviews. The best that can be said is they don't work as intended. The question is whether Amazon can actually fix this problem rather than continuing band-aid over it.
metalliqaz · 2026-08-27 16:44:28 UTC
they only care about preventing customer data escaping their grasp
yunwal · 2026-08-28 07:37:06 UTC
> Bots and such have really ruined the value of customer reviews.

This is not true. Bots and such have ruined the value of ratings aggregations. Individual reviews are still useful because you can always find some that you can tell are not bots

0cf8612b2e1e · 2026-08-27 16:42:04 UTC
Amazon has also changed their email receipts to be worthless. Previously, you would get the product name and price paid, giving you a minimal record sufficient for tracking. Now you get an email that says N items, broadly categorized (housewares, pets, clothing) and no pricing information.

Clearly a customer focused decision.

dgrin91 · 2026-08-27 16:44:28 UTC
This one infuriates me to no end. On credit card bills amazon orders show up as random garbage strings in the description. I had systems that would read these emails and pull out the product data so that I can feed it into my finance tracking system. Now I can't do anything.
joshstrange · 2026-08-27 17:34:45 UTC
This also frustrates me, I vibe-coded [0] a chrome extension that reads the data from Amazon's website (read orders and purchases, which are different things...) and then matches them against the YNAB entries and then updates the memo line in YNAB with the name of the item(s) (after running the item name through a small LLM, haiku, to clean up amazon-speak into something reasonable).

This has been working well for me overall.

It's not open source (or paid), it's just for me and I'm not looking to maintain or support it but it should be easy to replicate. It does require I go to Amazon on my desktop and click the extension and tell it to "Sync" but that's easy enough and it makes my budgeting way easier.

[0] I did this over 1.5 years ago (Jan 2025) so it's probably even easier now, I wrote it with Aider and it cost $27.81 in API credits (this was before Claude Code/coding subscriptions). The only reason I know the cost so exactly is that I had started to write a blog post about it but abandoned it.

secabeen · 2026-08-27 18:44:27 UTC
Quicken Desktop (yes, it still exists) just added this as a new feature as well. It's pretty nice.
m463 · 2026-08-28 03:19:30 UTC
your credit card bills are super heavily data mined. I think what they're doing is fine.
sowbug · 2026-08-27 16:53:06 UTC
For a long time, it was actually even worse: they obfuscated the product name, and added other products they wanted you to buy. So when you searched your email for practically anything, all sorts of Amazon garbage would come back.
cromka · 2026-08-27 17:18:57 UTC
Someone explained how it relates to their AI shopping plans. Don't actually remember how.
xg15 · 2026-08-27 18:40:33 UTC
I remember reading they actively prevent AI agents from using their site or being able to track purchases. So congratulations, the uselessness for tracking is the point.
applfanboysbgon · 2026-08-27 18:40:22 UTC
This is to protect their data on you. E-mailing you specifics is handing your purchase history directly to Google and Microsoft (at least for the 90% of the population that use Gmail/Outlook). They would rather sell that than give it away for free.
0cf8612b2e1e · 2026-08-27 18:43:50 UTC
Oh I know why they did it. I am still furious that I am yet again getting a worse experience.
otterley · 2026-08-27 20:09:33 UTC
That shouldn't be Amazon's unilateral decision to make, though. They could have made that behavior optional, and if they were truly as Customer-Obsessed as they used to be, they would have (and they would also have observed that customers did not like the new behavior and reacted to that accordingly).
lenkite · 2026-08-28 06:08:17 UTC
I think you are getting downvoted for speaking truth because of first sentence which should be changed to "This is to MOAT their data on you". "protection" is invalid word.
VCFundedGenYer · 2026-08-27 19:48:08 UTC
No, sorry, this is a positive change that was overdue for years. Gmail (and likely other email providers) was scraping the contents of the email to build a list of your purchases and it was not possible to delete items or clear it.
bmitc · 2026-08-27 19:52:56 UTC
What's the purpose of the emails then?
0cf8612b2e1e · 2026-08-27 19:53:09 UTC
By this logic, nothing can ever be shared by email. Else someone (user included) might scrape some value from it.

If it is truly for my benefit, they could let me opt in or out of the behavior. I truly derive value from being able to search the local copy of my email to track purchases.

patch_cable · 2026-08-27 20:01:10 UTC
It’s my choice to use (or not use) Gmail. What data I share with them in exchange for their service is non of Amazon’s business. (If Amazon wanted to make this feature opt-in, sure, whatever.)
Lammy · 2026-08-28 05:07:17 UTC
I host my own email and I think this change sucks
tonymet · 2026-08-27 22:53:00 UTC
Likely to prevent google from collecting shopping habit signals to sell ads targeting to.
aitchnyu · 2026-08-28 10:45:04 UTC
It used to be the case with Amazon India. Now my Gmail shows my fish food will arrive in 2 days.
runjake · 2026-08-28 03:13:36 UTC
For those saying it’s to protect you from Google’s surveillance, I’ll say a couple things:

1. It redacts emails even to my personal domain.

2. Multiple Amazon reps have told me this is a common customer complaint and there’s no way to opt out of it. If it really were altruistic, Amazon would let you opt out.

PS: maybe I’m not in the loop yet but the first item I checked shows at least a hundred customer reviews on some sort of infinite scroll.

josefritzishere · 2026-08-27 17:14:04 UTC
Can't trust Bezos, but also can't trust AI spam. Whatever shall we do?
cardiffspaceman · 2026-08-27 18:08:38 UTC
Can we put Bezos on a PIP?
0x002A · 2026-08-28 14:00:04 UTC
PIP's are for useful people who might go against the flow, not for Bezos like.
lnxg33k1 · 2026-08-27 19:00:05 UTC
They make it so extremely easy to return that I've never actually bothered to read reviews
tonymet · 2026-08-27 22:54:42 UTC
Sometimes that’s not an option, e.g. buying snow chains before a ski trip. Often the reviews reveal product limitations that aren’t specified in the listing.
robocat · 2026-08-28 04:57:20 UTC
Years ago I bought a Dell XPS and an electric kettle, even though they both had a number one complaint on reviews (XPS: coil whine, kettle: plastic lid crazing).

Both products are still available and it seems they both have the same complaints from a decade ago.

"Dell continues to treat mild-to-moderate coil whine as an inherent characteristic of components rather than a manufacturing defect".

Leave a review to help others, but don't expect manufacturers to care about even egregious issues.

VCFundedGenYer · 2026-08-27 19:49:12 UTC
This is false. I was just on Amazon and none of what you said was true. The filter options and reviews are all there
kay_o · 2026-08-27 21:46:21 UTC
Presume this is an experiment or phased rollout.

I was just on Amazon and only the first page of reviews are visible if logged in and no reviews are visible if logged out.

edit: It seems badly done too as the (140) count next to the stars still links to the review section below the description's anchor but simply does nothing onclick due to the fact that the whole destination div is gone.

tonymet · 2026-08-27 22:53:42 UTC
It’s active on my account, and on the X example. It’s likely an experiment. I contacted CS and they need 5 days to respond.
Postosuchus · 2026-08-27 22:29:11 UTC
Hmm... Is it an experiment? I'm seeing all reviews both on the web and in the app (Android phone).

Having said so, I am not hopeful. Amazon has gone the enshittification route with the gusto few companies have. And they've been actively (and gleefully) making some of the most useful features near useless. This can be seen most pointedly with order history search. Whereas in the past searching for a string brought up the past orders based on string match, now trying to search for a given term brings up gobs of past orders with items having absolutely no relevance to that search term. My cynical theory here is that someone "improved" order search by bolting on "AI."

It pains me a lot. I've been a fiercely loyal Amazon customer since 1994 and for a long time they've been the most customer-obsessed company out there. I can't even describe how different things are now.

tonymet · 2026-08-27 22:56:26 UTC
I’m guessing it’s an experiment, since some customers still see the old behavior . I’m in the no-reviews experiment, and so is the twitter post.
HackerThemAll · 2026-08-28 08:36:41 UTC
Have you already brought your country through laziness and convenience to a state where you are subordinate to Amazon?

Don't you have other e-commerce sites?