As the pandemic rages on, more people are having their groceries delivered, including by Amazon Fresh, and Whole Foods (which is, of course, owned by Amazon). If you are using either Amazon Fresh or Whole Foods delivery, you may be wondering how to turn on instant SMS notifications to let you know when your delivery is en route, and when the driver is pulling up to your house. These are notifications that Instacart provides automatically – but Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh not so much.
If, like us, you spent hours trying to figure out how to turn on these notifications, and have ended up reading our article out of frustration (and Googling), we get it. In fact, that’s why we were doggedly determined to figure everything out – so we could pass the information on to you.
First we looked in the obvious places, like our Amazon account settings. Your Amazon account has a dizzying array of account settings, including “Ordering and shopping preferences,” “Digital content and devices,” “Memberships and subscriptions,” “Shopping programs and rentals,” and “Communication and content”.
Of course, it’s the last one there, Communication and content, that makes the most sense in terms of where you would expect to find the setting for text notifications of Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods deliveries.
Under the ‘Communication and content’ section you will find listed:
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Messages from Amazon and sellers
Email subscriptions
Advertising preferences
Communication preferences
Shipment updates via text
Alexa shopping notifications
Deals Notifications
Videos you’ve uploaded
We can rule out Email subscriptions, Advertising preferences, Deals Notifications, Alexa shopping notifications, and Videos you’ve uploaded, leaving Communication preferences, and Shipment updates via text.
Well, in case you haven’t already gone down this rabbit hole, we can tell you that no, the settings to turn on text message notifications of impending and arriving deliveries from Fresh and WF are not in the communications preferences settings, nor are they they included in ‘Shipment updates via text’.
After spending way too much time poring over the website, we picked up the phone and called Amazon’s customer service phone number (888-280-4331) and, simultaneously, opened a chat session with them (belts and suspenders, dontcha know).
The chat session CSR (customer service representative) was worse than useless – they copied and pasted into the chat session how to turn notifications on for an iPhone – not how to turn Amazon notifications on – the general settings for turning on notifications on your phone!
The second person to whom we were transferred on the phone, however, was much more helpful, even if what they told us wasn’t what we wanted to hear.
“Yeah, Instacart is great, they do it right,” they acknowledged, “we don’t have a notifications system like they do. Have you tried downloading the Whole Foods app? Maybe there’s some notification options in the app?”
Well, we duly downloaded the Whole Foods app, which we had removed from our phone once we stopped going into Whole Foods in person when the pandemic hit. But, as had been the case before we removed it, there was still no option to order delivery from Whole Foods; the Whole Foods app just gives you information about in-store sales, let’s you create a shopping list, and gives you a pretty QR code to show the nice person at the cash register so that you can get your Amazon Prime discount during checkout.
Also, while we were downloading and installing the Whole Foods app, we also downloaded and installed the Amazon Shopping app, which promises to let you “Track orders in real time.” This sounded promising, and so we created two test orders – one from Whole Foods (through the Amazon website), and one from Amazon Fresh, which we created in the Amazon Shopping app.
Still no text messages..but, to be fair, the Amazon Shopping app did start giving us iPhone app notifications of orders being received, filled, and en route, for both the Amazon Fresh order, and the Whole Foods order ! But no SMS text messages. Which would probably be ok, but also the notifications did not come with any alert sound, even though we had ‘sounds’ set to on, and the ringer all the way up, so if you don’t happen to be looking at your phone when the app notification comes through, you won’t be… er… alerted to it.
The bottom line? The reason you can’t find a way to get SMS notifications of Whole Foods or Amazon Fresh deliveries is because…there are none. It’s pretty shocking that Amazon hasn’t implemented these sorts of notifications, given how every single other gig delivery system has them, and has for some time.
So, for now, we will stick with Instacart.
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