In recent years, Amazon.com has been adding products sold by other companies to its Marketplace. This is great because it means more product selection and better prices. And the purchase experience is consistently good; it’s not much different whether you buy a product from Amazon.com directly or from a third-party.

The biggest difference is the emails received post-transaction. I recently made a purchase from Amazon.com that resulted in 9 follow-up transaction emails. Yikes!

These are the emails:

1. Order confirmation for 3 products from 3 different vendors  (from Amazon)
2. Shipping notice from Vendor #1
3. Shipping notice from Vendor #2
4. Shipping notice from Vendor #3
5. Shipping notice for Vendor #1 (from Amazon)
6. Shipping notice for Vendor #2 (from Amazon)
7. Shipping notice for Vendor #3 (from Amazon)
8. Rate Your Transaction (from Amazon)
9. Review your purchases (from Amazon)

It’d be great if Amazon didn’t send 2 different emails for each product shipment, and even combine the “Rate Your Transaction” and “Review Your Purchases” into a single email. This way, 9 emails would be cut down to a more manageable 5.

(On top of these transaction emails, I’ve gotten 15 marketing emails in the last 30 days from Amazon. This just adds to the email clutter I get from Amazon. I know I can opt out of the marketing emails, but I actually like some of them.)

Email is a critical communication channel for Foodoro’s own marketplace, and we’re trying to be careful not to flood our users’ inboxes (we hate spam, too!). Currently, a purchase from 3 different foodmakers would result in 4 emails:

1. Order confirmation
2. Your Order Has Shipped (Foodmaker #1)
3. Your Order Has Shipped (Foodmaker #2)
4. Your Order Has Shipped (Foodmaker #3)

We are considering sending a follow-up email asking about the product and user experience. Any thoughts if this would be too much email?

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