Amazon.com told third-party sellers it would soon begin excluding buyer information from its seller sales-notification emails, called "Sold, ship now" emails. The company said it was making the change to protect confidential customer information, and to increase the reliability and security of communications about orders.
The "Sold, ship now" email notifications will only inform sellers that a customer has purchased one of their products along with the quantities and product titles of the items in the order. It will no longer be including information about the buyer, such as the buyer email address, or information about the order, such as the order ID or the product ID, in "Sold, ship now" emails.
Sellers can use features in their "Your Seller Account" to manage orders, where they are able to retrieve order information using the "View your recent Marketplace orders" and the "Search your Marketplace orders" features. Pro Merchant subscribers can also generate Order Fulfillment Reports from Your Seller Account using this path: Reports > Get listing and fulfillment reports.
Amazon.com had introduced desktop software to provide encrypted order alerts in January. The Amazon Services Order Notifier software runs in the background and periodically polls Amazon.com and retrieves new orders. (See "Amazon.com Rolls Out Anti-Phishing System for Third-Party Sellers," By Steve Weber, AuctionBytes Newsflash, 2/17/07 at http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y07/m02/i16/s02).
Amazon said it would determine the final date for the "Sold, ship now" email change "in the very near future."