Amazon had earlier updated the way they send emails to customers. I wrote about this late last year.
Before the change, customers used to get detailed mails that featured the actual product details including price. After the change, the emails were sparse – for any detail about which product the email is referring to, you need to click on the link and go to the website/app to know.
Reason? Amazon did not want third parties to scrape through the data and accumulate valuable data about buying behavior that can be correlated with customer data.
I had another idea around this thought by Amazon where it goes to such efforts to mask the data from other business entities because the data is bound to be extremely valuable.
What do you do with the Amazon packages you get after taking out what’s inside? Throw it away, I presume, like everyone else?
How do you throw it away? It’s usually cardboard boxes or plastic bags of assorted sizes and you throw it away normally and hope that it is somehow recycled.
Now, do you remove your name and address from the label prominently pasted on the package?
I started doing it long ago when I was new to e-commerce, but eventually, I do not bother anymore. I’m reasonably sure that a lot of people don’t, either.
My logic is this: What can anyone do with my name and address, anyway? If there’s a phone number or email ID, they could spam me, but both those details are not present – just the name and mailing address. So, why bother? And who is going to bother with the garbage packs in a dumpster?
So the question is this: what if someone does bother with these now-garbage e-commerce packs?
Besides the name and address, there are a few other details that can be gleaned including the product category (item type) and possibly more details by reading some of the coded information.
We buy a LOT of stuff via e-commerce and throw away a L-O-T of empty e-commerce packs.
Could someone create an entity that is meant for structured, large-scale recycling of e-commerce packaging garbage and the side-business is data gathering? Is it possible to incentivize rag-pickers by equipping them with scanners to upload raw data into a central server that collects this data (and pay them per address – this is a worthy side-effect)?
And analyze the data so that it can be sorted, tabulated, and sold to companies and marketing agencies? How can this be useful, you ask? Imagine – against my name and address, if there are 17 entries under the category ‘beauty’, could that be useful to companies in this segment? Or ‘electronics’? Or ‘grocery’? And so on.
The value would come in when the data is BIG – that’s when, after it is sorted, the data would start singing. Think about it – a new beauty brand could test-launch a product in an area within a city that has demonstrated the most ‘beauty’ category purchases within a period of time.
The potential use-cases in marketing and brand/market research, and the ways in which brands or agencies could engage using only mailing addresses, are limited only by imagination.
The question then is this: how valuable can this data be (that too without email or phone number where the spam/marketing potential is the easiest) and to whom/which kind of companies? That may decide the investment needed to set up an operation like this, with or without a front built around recycling.
And this need not be about Amazon alone – it could be for any e-commerce packages that are discarded.
What do you think? 🙂
PS: Of course… there is the question about data privacy.