Have you noticed your Amazon orders coming in with an unusually lengthy phone number, like +1-415-851-9136?
What’s up with that?
There’s not a lot of information out there online, so we thought we’d go into it a bit to help provide store owners with some additional context.
Recently Amazon made an update to the way they handle customer details, which will anonymize the customer’s phone number to protect their privacy. Instead, what you’ll see is an Amazon phone number with a temporary extension added at the end of it, which will automatically expire once the package has been delivered to your customer.
With this change in mind, when you receive an order from Amazon you’ll see that an automatically-generated phone number will display along with the customer details, similar to this one:
So all your Amazon customers will now have the same phone number with the 415 area code, but they will each have their own unique extension, similar to the x12345 example seen above.
Of course, as with any sudden change, it can also lead to unintended consequences. In this case, Amazon’s update resulted in the phone number format being too long for some other services, as many of them will cap the numbers at 20-25 characters – including Amazon! So when an order comes in with a phone number like +1 415-851-9136 ext. 12345 (which is 26 characters), some services could reject it when you attempt to submit the order because that format is too long.
To help smooth things out between Amazon and other services you’re using through Order Desk, we have begun reformatting these phone numbers from Amazon to keep them under 20 characters. You don’t need to do anything on your end to move things along; our platform will do this for you automatically when the order is initially imported.
If you’d like to read Amazon’s announcement regarding this recent change, you can check out their post here:
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/t/customer-phone-number-anonymization/455085
