Another Reason to Love Amazon

I'm a big fan of the notion that we should be in control of our own data and vendors that make our data more readily accessible to their customers will have a competitive advantage. Although this is probably conventional wisdom in the B2B or commercial space, I don't think that its well enough recognized in the consumer space.

On Amazon's site, you can choose: Your Account > Your Orders > Order History Reports and download a pretty complete summary of activity on your account in csv format. We are very satisfied Prime members and feel like we use Amazon a lot. We ordered 108 items on Amazon last year, making our per unit cost of prime less than $1. Some were food related (on subscriptions) but many were books and electronics. A great deal for us.

Some quick thoughts on extensions:

• Grocery Store: How cool would it be for you to be able to download an entire year's worth of food purchases. You know that they are collecting this information about you for their convenience. Why not make it available to you for your convenience? Layer some analytics on top of it. Sure, it will be an incomplete list of things you purchased, but it would also give you incentive to only shop at one chain, to ensure all of your purchases are saved in one place, making the analytics all that much more powerful.
• Drug Stores: Big missed opportunity here. CVS and Walgreens should be providing a means for people to print out receipts for all HSA/FSA eligible items that they've purchased over the previous year. This would be perfect for people like me who are not very careful to save their receipts, but then want to file all at once. Generate a PDF and you are good to go and submit.
• Home Improvement Stores: Another big opportunity missed: when selling a house, you can write off the gains, all of the money that you've put into the house. Why not let people track what they've spent on improvement projects (over long periods of time) with purchase order trackers for the individuals. This would allow them to separate out capital improvements from the purchase of lawn fertilizer, which is obviously not allowed.
• Discount Stores: Why doesn't Wal-mart or Target allow us to see how much we've saved by shopping there (relative to our store of choice)? This seems like an obvious way for them to reinforce how "everyday low prices" they really are.

I really can't think of good reasons for these types of retailers to not do this. Are they afraid that customers will suddenly notice that they've spent a lot of money on a particular category of items? Or is there just a profound lack of creativity on the part of companies with respect to the usefulness of customer data to customers?