Just a few hours after receiving the visit of Their Majesties the Three Kings of the East, we all hope that the gifts are something secret until the time comes to open them if we have behaved well and they have not brought us coal.
However, if you have any devices that are compatible with the Alexa voice assistant and linked to your Amazon account, this surprise could be ruined in a matter of seconds.
Alexa can spoil the surprise
Among the many and very useful functions that Alexa has, one of them is to allow us to know the status of the orders that we have placed on Amazon, which can help us to calculate if we are going to continue at home to receive the merchandise or if they are going to to arrive on time if we have an emergency.
However, this function can be turned against us at Christmas time. Next January 6th we will open the Three Kings’ gifts and we all want there to be a surprise component to make us more excited, but if someone is close to Alexa… it may count more than it should.
This function can allow our relatives to visit our home, our partner or a relative to find out what the Three Wise Men have bought for them. Luckily, like so many others, these alerts can be turned off, as Amazon has a specific function for this.
Turn off gift notifications
We will need to have the Alexa application to be able to deactivate the alerts for our purchases and in this way there is less chance of a surprise being ruined on Three Kings Day 2023. The steps to follow are really simple:
- Click on the “More” section at the bottom right of the app.
- Access the “Settings” tab.
- “Notifications” option.
- First of all, you will see “Purchases with Amazon”.
- Finally, we deactivate the option “Include products that could be gifts”.
If you prefer to stay safe and deactivate absolutely all purchase notifications, follow these steps from the configuration and settings menu of your Amazon account:
- Access the Amazon store.
- Enter “Account and lists”.
- Go to “Email alerts, messages, ads and cookies”.
- Click on “Alexa Purchase Notifications”.
- We deactivated the option “Include products that could be gifts”.
- Deactivate the two options in the “Ready for delivery” or “Delivered” section.
In this way during the time that these notifications are deactivated we will not see any notification again of this type and our secrets will be safe before they tear the wrapping paper. Notifications will not arrive on our phone informing about the status of the orders, nor will Alexa be able to reveal the gift if we ask for it. In this simple way, the products that we mark as a “gift” will continue to be a surprise.
