4 ms·

My biggest current peeve is not allowing me to see shipping costs until I’ve given basically all my information to a company before I’ve checked out.

WirelessGigabit 3y ago
Including your email address. And then you abandon the cart, because it doesn't make sense for you to pay $50 for shipping. But then you get those emails 'you forgot something'. No I didn't.
- badwolf 3y ago
  And you're forever on their "mailing list" because they don't process unsubscribes, since they probably just manually upload a .csv of everyone every time they want to send something to you, whether you ever opted in, or not.
  - Tagbert 3y ago
    Then you are justified to put them on the spam filter.
  - Modified3019 3y ago
    I just got done switching from gmail to fastmail, and it solves this problem beautifully with a nifty feature allowing me to create a new proxy (“masked”) email address for every website but have the mail show up in my mail address. There’s a limit, but it’s like 600+ or something. So when the email gets sold and I start getting spammed, I can easy kill it, and also know who the culprit was. This one is paid, but I’m at the point where $140 for 3 years “standard” package is fine by me. Not to mention I can actually call someone if I have a problem, instead of getting blocked by google for no particular reason without any recourse. I don’t have a huge social media following that can get me special treatment. There may possibly be free options that allow you to proxy/mask emails, but I’ve not explored that. Another useful service is privacy.com, which in a similar manner let’s me create proxy virtual payment cards, setting limits and redacting cards. This kills the possibility of a malicious business like a telecom still charging me for something and having the bank still allow it to go through when they shouldn’t. Now my credit union is pretty good so far, but there are a lot of banks that will happily fuck someone over without a care. It’s nice having no mean _No_
    - rjbwork 3y ago
      I do this on gmail myself. I have my own domain and pay for gmail on it. I have a wildcard set to go to my mailbox and wildcard stuff gets sorted per usual. So for instance, if I buy something at target, I use/sign in w/ target@mydomain.com. I know I should probably get off of gmail, but it's a really good service for my needs. It's also reasonably priced and there's no limit for those email addresses since it just captures every email sent to my domain. Downside is I can't send from those addresses but that's generally okay for me.
      - Gigachad 3y ago
        I used to do this but ended up in too many situations on the phone where someone says “what’s your email” and I can’t remember what email I gave them and I look like an idiot who doesn’t know what their email is. Now I just mark any marketing email as spam and let the email service automatically move all future emails to spam.
        nullfield 3y ago
        I did too, and I’m not sure what the best fix is. Proton has SimpleLogin after buying it, but then they own me forever as much as the next company, with the caveat that they can raise fees. Just your username and (ridiculously crazy, 26 character) password isn’t good enough anymore-“oops, we need to send you an email before you can log in” is rapidly becoming normal.
    - zzo38computer 3y ago
      > solves this problem beautifully with a nifty feature allowing me to create a new proxy (“masked”) email address for every website but have the mail show up in my mail address ... So when the email gets sold and I start getting spammed, I can easy kill it, and also know who the culprit was I do something like that too, but I have my own SMTP server. It doesn't use + it is just an entirely different email address for each one. I can also easily send from any address by the -r switch.
      - 3y ago
- frfl 3y ago
  Solution to this is to use a masked email or at the very least add a `+` tag so you can block it easily or know who's the source of the junk mail. Fastmail offers this feature, and I think 1password might. The `+` tag should be possible with any provider, `me+hn@example.com` Of course now you have to have a way to keep track of what email you gave to what company. I usually do `firstname_company/website@` to make it easier to remember.
  - jjulius 3y ago
    That's not really a viable solution for the average, not-so-tech-savvy folk, though. Edit: Hit me with the downvotes, I don't mind, but I also enjoy hearing about why my perspective might be wrong. From where I sit, I can imagine that plenty of people annoyed by these kinds of email harvesting patterns also don't know enough to employ the kind of method described here. I feel like that's a solution, but not one that can be prescribed to the average joe.
    - reaperducer 3y ago
      That's not really a viable solution for the average, not-so-tech-savvy folk, though. Not at this moment, but we're getting close More and more often, Safari offers to fill in an anonymized email address for me when I fill out a form. It's not detected and offered 100% off the time, but is improving. Even my wife has started using it, and she is not a techie.
    - Sebb767 3y ago
      > That's not really a viable solution for the average, not-so-tech-savvy folk, though. You can explain this feature of gmail/fastmail to a reasonably technical person in 5 minutes, where 'reasonably technical' means that the person understands the concept of mail folders. Sure, it might not work that easy for your grandma, but I'm reasonably certain that most people in the developed under 40 fall in that category.
  - gruez 3y ago
    Isn't it trivial for websites to strip out the +? I feel like between this, and the various sites that don't support + in email addresses for whatever reason, this trick isn't worth doing.
- davidmurdoch 3y ago
  I do this on purpose because about 24 hours later sometimes they'll send you a 10% off code.
ianlevesque 3y ago
This is why Amazon is still winning. The competition needs to compete better.
- _jal 3y ago
  Amazon is at least as awful. I cancelled Prime about a year ago - delivery sucks at my location with their logistics and I just don't want to deal with it. I still occasionally order some things that are hard to find elsewhere, I just ship it to an address where things won't be immediately stolen. And after the huge "subscribe prime" interstitial with the tiny "not now" button, they still add prime to the order, not as a regular line-item, but as something you have to hunt around for to remove. They're cramming, just like telecom used to. Amazon is awful if you have the temerity to fail to tithe them as they believe they are due. Fuck them.
  - tredre3 3y ago
    I agree with everything you said and almost got tricked back into Prime myself. And yet, somehow, Amazon is still the least bad option for me.
  - sombragris 3y ago
    Confirmed. I needed to purchase something from Amazon Spain and was put into Prime despite choosing "not now". I just cancelled (after hunting thousands of options) and now all the cancellation I have is that "my free period won't be renewed". So I actually have to wait until September 1st to verify I am actually out of the subscription and that no charge is made to my card. Extremely slimy and awful if you ask me.
- fivre 3y ago
  Amazon isn't necessarily competing better (though they often are--even if im okay getting a slower delivery, not-Amazon vendor sites will do shit like require signature confirmation without the purchaser requesting it, which makes the package all but undeliverable to certain apartments), but they win on the guarantee that buying a product through Amazon isn't going to sign me up for an endless stream of marketing email. Granted, Amazon has much less need for that endless stream of marketing email because they're already the de facto first choice shop. It's a lose-lose game if you're a conscious consumer and both want to support a non-Amazon monoculture for internet retail but also don't want to have to yet another drip feed of marketing email. Ideally there'd be competition among email service providers to recognize the modern landscape of CAN-SPAM compliant but entirely unsolicited and unwanted email and provide user tools that aggressively bin non-transactional email and penalize senders that send 10 "transactional" emails for a single interaction ("here's your confirmation! here's a shipping update! here's another shipping update! are you satisfied with your purchase? leave a review!) as shadow marketing. Either they're knowingly doing this for brand reinforcement reasons or are honestly clueless and don't recognize that a single email that links to a continuously-updated order status page is preferable. I figure mostly the former, but either way there are limited mechanisms to encourage vendors to make judicious use of email.
TheAngryCanuck 3y ago
This actually worked out to my advantage! I did this on a site, found out that they didn't ship to Canada so I abandoned the cart. I got all the oh no emails so I emailed them back telling them I CAN'T buy their stuff because you WON'T ship to me. Couple of days later the company CEO emails me back. First he apologises (bonus points to a Canadian), promises to fix the cart abandon logic, and offers to ship me 2 of the things I was going to buy for free. They will hopefully arrive this week
- sublinear 3y ago
  That sounds like a fine resolution, but I wouldn't hold your breath. Far too many businesses are being run by people completely out of the loop. Emails, especially from the CEO, are legally binding.
  - TheAngryCanuck 3y ago
    I'm not saying this would be the response from every situation like this. I was just really pleasantly surprised
duxup 3y ago
That’s wild. Is this some specific gear or something?
geraldwhen 3y ago
Some sites ship by weight and size instead of fixed rate. UPS and FedEx shipment prices fluctuate intra daily, and sometimes by quite a bit. I’ve used sites that required the same, and the shipping costs would update so frequently that I ran scanners to find good deals on time to buy.

WirelessGigabit 3y ago

Including your email address. And then you abandon the cart, because it doesn't make sense for you to pay $50 for shipping. But then you get those emails 'you forgot something'. No I didn't.

badwolf 3y ago
And you're forever on their "mailing list" because they don't process unsubscribes, since they probably just manually upload a .csv of everyone every time they want to send something to you, whether you ever opted in, or not.
- Tagbert 3y ago
  Then you are justified to put them on the spam filter.
- Modified3019 3y ago
  I just got done switching from gmail to fastmail, and it solves this problem beautifully with a nifty feature allowing me to create a new proxy (“masked”) email address for every website but have the mail show up in my mail address. There’s a limit, but it’s like 600+ or something. So when the email gets sold and I start getting spammed, I can easy kill it, and also know who the culprit was. This one is paid, but I’m at the point where $140 for 3 years “standard” package is fine by me. Not to mention I can actually call someone if I have a problem, instead of getting blocked by google for no particular reason without any recourse. I don’t have a huge social media following that can get me special treatment. There may possibly be free options that allow you to proxy/mask emails, but I’ve not explored that. Another useful service is privacy.com, which in a similar manner let’s me create proxy virtual payment cards, setting limits and redacting cards. This kills the possibility of a malicious business like a telecom still charging me for something and having the bank still allow it to go through when they shouldn’t. Now my credit union is pretty good so far, but there are a lot of banks that will happily fuck someone over without a care. It’s nice having no mean _No_
  - rjbwork 3y ago
    I do this on gmail myself. I have my own domain and pay for gmail on it. I have a wildcard set to go to my mailbox and wildcard stuff gets sorted per usual. So for instance, if I buy something at target, I use/sign in w/ target@mydomain.com. I know I should probably get off of gmail, but it's a really good service for my needs. It's also reasonably priced and there's no limit for those email addresses since it just captures every email sent to my domain. Downside is I can't send from those addresses but that's generally okay for me.
    - Gigachad 3y ago
      I used to do this but ended up in too many situations on the phone where someone says “what’s your email” and I can’t remember what email I gave them and I look like an idiot who doesn’t know what their email is. Now I just mark any marketing email as spam and let the email service automatically move all future emails to spam.
      - nullfield 3y ago
        I did too, and I’m not sure what the best fix is. Proton has SimpleLogin after buying it, but then they own me forever as much as the next company, with the caveat that they can raise fees. Just your username and (ridiculously crazy, 26 character) password isn’t good enough anymore-“oops, we need to send you an email before you can log in” is rapidly becoming normal.
  - zzo38computer 3y ago
    > solves this problem beautifully with a nifty feature allowing me to create a new proxy (“masked”) email address for every website but have the mail show up in my mail address ... So when the email gets sold and I start getting spammed, I can easy kill it, and also know who the culprit was I do something like that too, but I have my own SMTP server. It doesn't use + it is just an entirely different email address for each one. I can also easily send from any address by the -r switch.
    - 3y ago
frfl 3y ago
Solution to this is to use a masked email or at the very least add a `+` tag so you can block it easily or know who's the source of the junk mail. Fastmail offers this feature, and I think 1password might. The `+` tag should be possible with any provider, `me+hn@example.com` Of course now you have to have a way to keep track of what email you gave to what company. I usually do `firstname_company/website@` to make it easier to remember.
- jjulius 3y ago
  That's not really a viable solution for the average, not-so-tech-savvy folk, though. Edit: Hit me with the downvotes, I don't mind, but I also enjoy hearing about why my perspective might be wrong. From where I sit, I can imagine that plenty of people annoyed by these kinds of email harvesting patterns also don't know enough to employ the kind of method described here. I feel like that's a solution, but not one that can be prescribed to the average joe.
  - reaperducer 3y ago
    That's not really a viable solution for the average, not-so-tech-savvy folk, though. Not at this moment, but we're getting close More and more often, Safari offers to fill in an anonymized email address for me when I fill out a form. It's not detected and offered 100% off the time, but is improving. Even my wife has started using it, and she is not a techie.
  - Sebb767 3y ago
    > That's not really a viable solution for the average, not-so-tech-savvy folk, though. You can explain this feature of gmail/fastmail to a reasonably technical person in 5 minutes, where 'reasonably technical' means that the person understands the concept of mail folders. Sure, it might not work that easy for your grandma, but I'm reasonably certain that most people in the developed under 40 fall in that category.
- gruez 3y ago
  Isn't it trivial for websites to strip out the +? I feel like between this, and the various sites that don't support + in email addresses for whatever reason, this trick isn't worth doing.
davidmurdoch 3y ago
I do this on purpose because about 24 hours later sometimes they'll send you a 10% off code.

ianlevesque 3y ago

This is why Amazon is still winning. The competition needs to compete better.

_jal 3y ago
Amazon is at least as awful. I cancelled Prime about a year ago - delivery sucks at my location with their logistics and I just don't want to deal with it. I still occasionally order some things that are hard to find elsewhere, I just ship it to an address where things won't be immediately stolen. And after the huge "subscribe prime" interstitial with the tiny "not now" button, they still add prime to the order, not as a regular line-item, but as something you have to hunt around for to remove. They're cramming, just like telecom used to. Amazon is awful if you have the temerity to fail to tithe them as they believe they are due. Fuck them.
- tredre3 3y ago
  I agree with everything you said and almost got tricked back into Prime myself. And yet, somehow, Amazon is still the least bad option for me.
- sombragris 3y ago
  Confirmed. I needed to purchase something from Amazon Spain and was put into Prime despite choosing "not now". I just cancelled (after hunting thousands of options) and now all the cancellation I have is that "my free period won't be renewed". So I actually have to wait until September 1st to verify I am actually out of the subscription and that no charge is made to my card. Extremely slimy and awful if you ask me.
fivre 3y ago
Amazon isn't necessarily competing better (though they often are--even if im okay getting a slower delivery, not-Amazon vendor sites will do shit like require signature confirmation without the purchaser requesting it, which makes the package all but undeliverable to certain apartments), but they win on the guarantee that buying a product through Amazon isn't going to sign me up for an endless stream of marketing email. Granted, Amazon has much less need for that endless stream of marketing email because they're already the de facto first choice shop. It's a lose-lose game if you're a conscious consumer and both want to support a non-Amazon monoculture for internet retail but also don't want to have to yet another drip feed of marketing email. Ideally there'd be competition among email service providers to recognize the modern landscape of CAN-SPAM compliant but entirely unsolicited and unwanted email and provide user tools that aggressively bin non-transactional email and penalize senders that send 10 "transactional" emails for a single interaction ("here's your confirmation! here's a shipping update! here's another shipping update! are you satisfied with your purchase? leave a review!) as shadow marketing. Either they're knowingly doing this for brand reinforcement reasons or are honestly clueless and don't recognize that a single email that links to a continuously-updated order status page is preferable. I figure mostly the former, but either way there are limited mechanisms to encourage vendors to make judicious use of email.

TheAngryCanuck 3y ago

This actually worked out to my advantage! I did this on a site, found out that they didn't ship to Canada so I abandoned the cart. I got all the oh no emails so I emailed them back telling them I CAN'T buy their stuff because you WON'T ship to me. Couple of days later the company CEO emails me back. First he apologises (bonus points to a Canadian), promises to fix the cart abandon logic, and offers to ship me 2 of the things I was going to buy for free. They will hopefully arrive this week

sublinear 3y ago
That sounds like a fine resolution, but I wouldn't hold your breath. Far too many businesses are being run by people completely out of the loop. Emails, especially from the CEO, are legally binding.
- TheAngryCanuck 3y ago
  I'm not saying this would be the response from every situation like this. I was just really pleasantly surprised

duxup 3y ago

That’s wild. Is this some specific gear or something?

geraldwhen 3y ago

Some sites ship by weight and size instead of fixed rate. UPS and FedEx shipment prices fluctuate intra daily, and sometimes by quite a bit. I’ve used sites that required the same, and the shipping costs would update so frequently that I ran scanners to find good deals on time to buy.