Shopping Frenzy

To gain insight into his Amazon orders, Mike Schilli writes a Go program that runs statistics and displays the results graphically.

-  By Mike Schilli

Amazon has become synonymous with purchases of all kinds. Apart from heavy stuff from the home improvement store and secondhand items on eBay, I’m buying almost everything else I need there - so much so that I’m surprised that “I Amazoned it” hasn't caught on yet.

The never-ending flood of goods - amounting to several dozen orders per month - means that the time and effort needed to check the purchases is increasing in my household. For reasons of data protection or to avoid helping competitors, Amazon is reluctant to email information about the goods and their prices in your order. As an example of this, Amazon confirmations arriving in Gmail only reveal the order numbers, but they do not contain any further descriptions to prevent Google from harvesting information.

To analyze my buying behavior, I need a list of the items I ordered from the past month in a machine-readable CSV format; this actually used to be available on the website, but Amazon incomprehensibly changed things. You now have to click the Request your data link at the bottom of the Your Account page (Figure 1).

Obstacles

That's not all: If you confirm the request for a machine-readable CSV file on the following page, Amazon first prompts you to confirm the request by email “for security reasons.” When that is done, you receive a terse reply stating that the request has been received, but that the response could take up to a month. The nerve of some product managers at Jeff Bezos’ megamarket! In real life, though, I've found that it rarely takes more than 20 minutes for a message to arrive by email giving you a link to the download.